Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
The curriculum emphasizes the classics and the arts to the detriment
of the sciences. Despite these limitations, general secondary
education is often of high quality. Secondary-school
graduates usually qualify for admission to the University of
Haiti or institutions of higher learning abroad.
In 1996-97, approximately 15 percent of twelve- to eighteenyear-olds,
some 327,980 students, attended 1,170 secondary
schools. In addition to general secondary schools, several vocational
and business schools exist, most of them in metropolitan
Port-au-Prince.
Higher Education
Unlike primary and secondary school, enrollment at the
university level is primarily in public schools. Haiti's most
important institution of higher education is the University of
Haiti. Its origin dates to the 1820s, when colleges of medicine
and law were established. In 1942 the various faculties merged
into the University of Haiti. Enrollment at the state university
has more than doubled since the early 1980s. In 1994-95 there
were close to 10,000 students at the University of Haiti. About
25 percent of university students were enrolled in the Faculty
of Law and Economics; 33 percent at the National Institute of
Administration, Management, and International Studies; and
the remainder in agriculture, education, ethnology, applied
linguistics, medicine, pharmacy, science, and human sciences.
Most professors work part-time, teach several courses at different
institutions, and are paid on an hourly basis, leaving little
time available for broader contact with students. The University
of Haiti is an urban system dispersed into a number of
small facilities. It has chronic shortages of books, equipment,
and materials.
Since the 1980s, a new trend has developed in higher education,
the establishment of small, private, multidisciplinary institutions.
Such institutions include the Universite Quisqueya in
Port-au-Prince with 1,100 students (1995) and the Haitian
Adventist University (Universite Adventiste d' Haiti) with 500
students (1995). Several other smaller institutions have a combined
enrollment under 1,300 (1995), including the Caribbean
University (Universite Caraibe), American University of
the Caribbean, Haitian Southern Baptist Evangelical Mission
University (Universite Mission Evangelique Baptiste du Sud
d'Haiti), the University of King Christophe (Universite du Roi
Christophe) (Cap-Haitien), and the Jean Price Mars University
354