The University of Jordan: A Different Overview

"Jordan University is the best University in Jordan"

i will argue against this by underlining that Jordan University is the Largest, the First but surly not the best, i will try to state my reasons;

1 - The Problem of Administration and Numbers:

some Figures from the academic year 2005/2006:

Enrolled Students: 35,546
Academic Staff: 1177
Administrative Staff: 2578
Graduates: 7325
Operating Budget: 80,808,000 Dinars
Allocated Budget for Research: 650,000 Dinars
Published Books: 7 !!!

[source]

Apparently the numbers are saying something, the question that comes to my mind is who among the 3755 staff members cares about one student's academic performance or ever asked about his/her collective academic work over the course of the study years? what i noticed is that as long as i am enrolled, paying the tuition, my GPA is above 2, whatever I'm doing is irrelevant to any worker in this place. nobody cares, which leaves me with a question that begs itself to be asked, how does the university measure its success? what are the parameters ? will the vision differ with the next university president? should we rely on the GPA distribution to tell? or should we ask future employers about the fresh grads performance? this is kept for a later post to be discussed.

Important note ; does the Administrative staff set any goals to be achieved by the Academic staff through the students? i guess each has different interests!

The administrative staff cares to run the process / to manage 35000 student, so a student is reduced to a number in a process that has lots of holes, while the academic staff is limited with department budgets, and overwhelmed by procedures that need to be taken in order to break the ingrained bureaucracy in the system, i believe there is a communication failure due to the overwhelming amount of paper work and official letters needed to get anything approved, i don't think that the university is understaffed but it has absurd protocols between academic faculty staff/academic administrative faculty staff/central administrative units/deanship of student affairs and the president office. i think they should get facebooked!!

I hope you drew a picture by now, now lets zoom in for a bit, here are the figures for the faculty of engineering and technology student distribution;

BSc Scholars of Fall 06/07	Civil	Architecture	Electrical	Mechanical	Chemical	Industrial	Computer	Mechatronics
1st year female	44	139	20	10	71	78	79	23
2nd year female	52	111	19	7	58	78	79	17
3rd year female	58	98	15	2	53	59	44	13
4th year female	53	88	12	3	61	54	31	13
5th year femlae	39	72	6	3	37	47	24	9
male students from all years	560	192	604	451	94	357	412	479
female total	246	508	72	25	280	316	257	75
department total	806	700	676	476	374	673	669	554
female ratio %	30.52	72.57	10.65	5.25	74.87	46.95	38.42	13.54

BSc Scholars of Fall 06/07	Chemical	Industrial	Computer	Mechatrnics
1st year female	71	78	79	23
2nd year female	58	78	79	17
3rd year female	53	59	44	13
4th year female	61	54	31	13
5th year female	37	47	24	9
male students from all years	94	357	412	479
female total	280	316	257	75
epartment total	374	673	669	554
female Ratio %	74.87	46.95	38.42	13.54

The total number of students is approximately 5000 students, distributed on 8 departments where a department is responsible for 400 - 800 students! every department has its cleaning staff, secretary, chairperson, technicians, labs, inventory, technicians and running all this is part of the faculty management and not the central management, it is overwhelming in a way!

I think that the management in the faculties need to be re examined so staff members can have more free time to spend it working with the students and not in their offices, create a less complicated protocols between units, so faculties can have "a culture", "a life" , " an academic orientation towards clear goals" , without needing this bulk of entities that need to be informed to get it moving. real content and real work.

to be continued..