IS PUSHING PYRAMIDS POSSIBLE? A ROADMAP TO ALEVIATING BURDENED EDUCATION SYSTEMS THROUGH INVESTMENT-DRIVEN PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP (I-PPP) HIGHER EDUCATION & RESEARCH CLUSTERS. THE CASE OF EGYPT

Based on a diverse multidisciplinary literature review, this research builds on several assumptions, including the facts that the Egyptian education system (like many developing countries) is criticized on its quality of education, compounded by the enormous burden of offering constitutional-guaranteed free higher education to all. The gap between lean profitable private universities and not-for-profit public universities is wide. And the gap between Egyptian universities as whole and world-class foreign international universities is wider.

This research combines a logical conceptualization to building a model for filling these gaps, while offering an empirical validation with all its associated management implications, from a public policy perspective. The research proposes creation of state-of-art new PPP international universities, on new investment-zones dedicated to higher education and scientific research in a cluster form (i-PPP). The new universities will operate under a tri-partite model, involving the egyptian public universities, financial investors (local or foreign) and foreign international academic partner universities. This paper critically describes the proposed economic model and the governance model and delineates the roadmap to governmental implementation process of these models. This roadmap has already been adopted in the past 2 years, and has led to four prime-ministerial decrees for four such investment zones under this model; and a pipeline of 17 public universities are awaiting knowledge transfer and best practices of the first batch of four zones. the new zones are mandated to include industry-academia linkeages, and state of art facilities previously unaffordeable to public universities. the financial investor will be allowed attain returns on his investment with two academic partners, and the international academic partner will achieve internationalization objectives of its own.

This research identifies the theoretical foundation for the core concepts, the stakeholders, financial flow, academic programs, and concerns of the various entities throughout the roadmap spectrum from identification of need and issues of government-led economic initiatives to the process of adoption and issues of implementation and the legal obstacles.

The research concludes that investment zones are very suitable to the Higher education cluster needs of developing countries, especially the government-led clusters. The governance model has been validated and proven to adopt the different needs, and stages of development of the different universities seeking to apply it, and may provide a comprehensive reference to universities in other countries seeking to apply it. However, due to the relative novelty of this approach (2 years only), longitudinal research and model variations should be investigated in the future.