Neoliberal reform discourse in Egyptian higher education

In the past two decades, HE systems across diverse contexts converged around privatization, commodification, internationalization, and quality assurance. This convergence is attributed to the hegemony of a global neoliberal discourse, in which 'policy transfer/travel' denotes not just the movement of projects but the circulation of political discourses shaping reforms. International organizations, particularly the World Bank (WB), play a central role in organizing and disseminating the global HE discourse. The paper examines HE reforms in Egypt as a developing-country case where reforms were guided by the global neoliberal discourse. The WB significantly influenced Egyptian reforms beginning in the late 1990s, helping organize a 2000 national conference that produced the Higher Education Reform Strategy (HERS) and six national projects under the Higher Education Enhancement Project (HEEP), funded and supported by the WB. Although HEEP ended in 2008, the institutional, organizational, and discursive changes it set in motion continued in the same direction. Adopting a Foucauldian methodological framework (discourse and genealogical analysis), the study aims to question and de-naturalize the inevitability of the neoliberal discourse in Egyptian HE. It attends to enabling conditions that permitted the emergence of this discourse, ruptures and discontinuities that threatened it, and the institutional, organizational, and discursive effects it produced. Combining Foucauldian analysis with Jessop’s Strategic Relational Approach (SRA), the study employs the concept of structurally inscribed strategic selectivities to understand structural factors that enabled or constrained the emergence and acceptance of neoliberal discourse in Egyptian HE. It also situates governance within 'neoliberal authoritarianism,' an interweaving of neoliberal and authoritarian governmentalities.

Neoliberal discourse on HE: Neoliberalism is a political-economic rationality that maximizes market roles and reframes the state as facilitating market functioning. In a Foucauldian sense, it is also a moral system and mode of governance producing subjects, citizenship forms, and social organization. In HE, neoliberal reforms adopt new public management instruments—commercialization, competitiveness, internationalization, privatization, and marketization—encouraging universities to emulate private-sector management and to prioritize performativity, accountability, QA/accreditation, and results-oriented management amid reduced direct state funding. Critiques highlight detrimental effects on university values: universities become instrumentalized for economic ends; students are construed as customers; knowledge is valued monetarily; and faculty are de-professionalized. Neoliberal authoritarianism: The merging of neoliberal governmentality with authoritarian political logics has been noted both in the Global North and South. In HE, this manifests in threats to universities as democratic public spheres, constraints on academic freedom via managerial oversight aligned with QA audits, and hierarchical governance replacing collegial models. In authoritarian regimes, market-driven HE reforms can expand state control, mitigate political risks, and reduce the costs of direct repression. International organizations and global HE discourses: IOs, particularly the WB, organize and propagate the global HE discourse. Despite attempts to humanize its approach, the WB continues to recommend policies aligned with neoliberalism—liberalization, privatization, institutional differentiation, user fees, corporatist governance, QA systems, competitive funds, and output-linked funding—underpinned by a human capital framework. By contrast, UNESCO’s rights-based discourse proposes HE as a public good and human right, emphasizing equity, social justice, academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and context-sensitive solutions; however, it remains comparatively marginalized.

The study employs a Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) with a genealogical approach. Discourse is treated as constitutive practices that produce objects, subjectivities, power relations, knowledge, and regimes of truth. Genealogy focuses on the historical 'conditions of possibility' for discourse emergence, emphasizing ruptures and discontinuities rather than linear origins. FDA attends to the materiality of discourse—both its embedding in enabling conditions and its real effects—and focuses on what is said and what is excluded. To analyze how global neoliberal discourse was transferred to Egyptian HE, FDA is combined with Jessop’s Strategic Relational Approach (SRA). SRA addresses the dialectic between structure and agency through structurally inscribed strategic selectivities (opportunities and constraints shaped by social structures) and agentic selectivities (actors’ differential capacities to exploit them). The analysis incorporates discursive and technological selectivities (per Sum and Jessop) and applies Verger’s framework of selectivities—administrative/regulatory viability, political institutions, contentious politics and legitimation, and crisis—to capture contingent variables that mediate the reception of global discourses. The study relies on historical and research literature documenting HE reforms in Egypt to answer three questions: enabling conditions for neoliberal discourse emergence; material impacts (included/excluded policies, institutions, standards, structures); and key discontinuities and their effects.

Enabling conditions for transfer (structural selectivities): - Administrative and regulatory viability: Prior positive experience with WB-funded Engineering and Technical Education Project (ETEP) created capacity and path-dependency for adopting HEEP, including piloted instruments like competitive funds and QA. Experienced engineering professors became key reform actors. WB funding and technical assistance were seen as guarantees of feasibility. - Political institutions: One-party dominance (NDP) facilitated insulated decision-making and a 'fabricated national consensus' around HEEP, despite a participatory veneer (e.g., NCEUHE, national conference). Reform design was explicitly top-down, aligning with patterns of neoliberal authoritarianism. - Contentious politics and legitimation: Policymakers depoliticized reform by framing it as technical and importing 'best practices' via study tours and international symposia, leading to adoption of QA models (e.g., NAQAAE) not customized to local context. Reliance on technocrats and WB-aligned experts neutralized political debate. - Crisis framing: Economic pressures (late 1980s onward), overcrowding, quality deterioration, and resource constraints were discursively framed as a HE crisis, shifting policy focus from access expansion to quality, enabling adoption of neoliberal reforms. Material consequences of neoliberal discourse: - Privatization and cost-sharing: Legalization and rapid expansion of private/Ahleyya universities alongside fee-based tracks in public universities (affiliation programs, foreign-language tracks, open education). By 2021 there were 36 private/Ahleyya universities vs 27 public; 2014–2021 growth: public universities +17.4%, private/Ahleyya +100%. Private enrollment in 2006/2007 was ~5% of public enrollment. Public universities’ funding shifted to include own-revenue generation (state capped contribution at 85% since 1994–1995). - State-controlled privatization: In an illiberal context, privatization coexisted with strong state control over private universities (curriculum, events), aiming to reduce fiscal pressure while producing depoliticized, market-aligned knowledge. - QA and accreditation regime: Establishment of QAAP (internal QA units, university QA centers, PCIQA competitive funding) and NAQAAE (external accreditation; Law 82/2006). Intended to align with international 'best practices' in teaching, research, and community service. Critiques and exclusions produced by the discourse: - QA shortcomings: Weak linkage between accreditation and actual quality improvement; QA reduced to formal procedures and documentation. Lack of autonomy and limited stakeholder participation (notably students) impaired QA effectiveness; QA served to legitimize and tighten state control. - Academic freedom and institutional autonomy marginalized: Persistent constraints (security presence, leadership appointments, restrictive laws) were sidelined in reform discourse. The 25 January 2011 revolution briefly enabled gains: campus police removal, elected university leaders, freer student unions, and expanded on-campus expression (2011–mid-2013). Post-July 2013 reversal: 1,181 student arrests and 21 extrajudicial killings (2013–2016), reinstated presidential appointments, security clearance for faculty travel, dissolution/control of student unions, and pervasive surveillance. - Equity and access de-problematized: Despite continued nominally free public HE, access is inequitable—over 40% of public university students in 2005 from the wealthiest quintile; richest 20% have 7× the HE enrollment chance of the poorest 20%; urban enrollment rates roughly double rural. Policymakers used inequity arguments to legitimize privatization and fee-based tracks without robust mitigations (loans/grants/vouchers). Evidence indicates public HE expansion tends to improve inclusiveness, while privatization exacerbates wealth and geographic biases.

The study set out to interrogate how a global neoliberal HE discourse became dominant in Egypt and to reveal its contingent, non-linear emergence and effects. By combining Foucauldian genealogy with SRA, the analysis shows that the transfer and embedding of neoliberal reforms were enabled by specific structural selectivities—administrative feasibility rooted in prior WB engagements, insulated political institutions that suppressed plural deliberation, depoliticizing legitimation strategies leveraging 'technical expertise,' and a crisis narrative reframing priorities toward quality and efficiency. These conditions rendered neoliberal options thinkable and actionable while marginalizing alternatives. Materially, the discourse produced durable institutional changes—privatization, cost-sharing, and a comprehensive QA/accreditation apparatus—while simultaneously constraining academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and equity considerations. QA mechanisms, adopted as markers of modernization, served in practice to bureaucratize quality and extend state oversight, consistent with neoliberal authoritarian dynamics in which market-oriented governance coexists with coercive and legal-institutional control. The 25 January revolution constituted a critical discontinuity, shifting power/knowledge relations and temporarily enabling a rights-based counter-discourse that foregrounded freedoms and autonomy. However, subsequent authoritarian restoration reversed these gains and reinforced the neoliberal-authoritarian nexus. Thus, the findings address the research questions by showing both the enabling conditions and the selective, enduring effects of neoliberal discourse, as well as the limits and temporality of disruptions in an authoritarian context.

Through Foucauldian discourse and genealogical analysis, the neoliberal reform discourse in Egyptian HE was questioned, problematized, and de-naturalized. The study showed how the emergence of the global neoliberal discourse in Egyptian HE was not a linear, natural, or rational process but rather the result of the interaction of a number of historical, political, and institutional factors that represented the conditions of the possibility of such discourse. Jessop's concept of structurally inscribed strategic selectivities was utilized to capture how certain historical and contingent variables (administrative and regulatory viability, political institutions, contentious politics and legitimation, and crisis) facilitated and allowed the transfer of the global neoliberal discourse to Egyptian HE via the WB's funded reform projects. The methodological combination between Foucauldian discourse and Jessop's structural approaches has captured the interaction between discursive and non-discursive elements of Egyptian HE reform policies. As a productive practice, the neoliberal discourse introduced institutional, organizational, and discursive practices and reforms in the Egyptian HE. Privatization, the introduction of user fees and cost-sharing strategies, and building systems of QA and accreditation constituted the major policy reforms that have emerged and persisted albeit ruptures, discontinuities, and transformations. Those reforms seem to have the capacity to persist and resurface, reflecting the hegemony of the neoliberal discourse. Just as the neoliberal discourse allowed for the persistence of some practices, it disallowed, excluded, and de-problematized socio-political problems mainly academic freedoms, university autonomy, and equitable access to HE. The 25th of January revolution was the major discontinuity that threatened the collapse of the neoliberal authoritarian discourse on HE reform and allowed for the emergence of a rights-based discourse that prioritizes academic freedoms and student rights. However, the defeat of the revolution through the military's return to power strengthens, perpetuates, and reinforces the hegemony of the neoliberal authoritarian discourse. While constructed as apolitical by the WB and successive governments, HE neoliberal practices are intertwined with authoritarian consolidation. The literature denotes a mutual relationship between neoliberalization and authoritarianism in Egypt. Breaking this cycle is only possible when university reforms are linked to social demands and macro-political changes, as glimpsed in the immediate aftermath of the 25th of January revolution.