Why Many Students Are Choosing Trade Programs Over College

BY OLIVIA SANCHEZ

It’s almost 4 p.m at the Nashville branch of the Tennessee College of Applied Technology, or TCAT, and the students in the auto collision repair night class are just starting their school day.

One is sanding the seal off the bed of his 1989 Ford F-350. Another is patiently hammering out a banged-up fender. A third, Cheven Jones, 26, is taking a break from working on his 2003 Lexus IS 300 to chat with some classmates.

While almost every sector of higher education is seeing fewer students registering for classes, many trade programs are booming. Mr. Jones and his classmates, seeking certificates and other short-term credentials, not associate degrees, are part of that upswing.

Mechanic and repair trade programs saw an enrollment increase of 11.5% from spring 2021 to 2022, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Enrollment in construction trades courses increased 19.3%, and culinary program enrollment increased 12.7%. Some trade programs are offered at community colleges, but in the same time span, overall enrollment at public two-year colleges declined 7.8%, and enrollment at public four-year institutions dropped by 3.4%, according to NSC.

Many young people who are choosing a trade program over a traditional four-year degree say that they are doing so because it’s much more affordable, and they see a more obvious path to a job.

“These kids are looking for relevance. They want to be able to connect what they’re learning with what happens next,” says Jean Eddy, president of American Student Assistance, a nonprofit focused on career readiness. (ASA is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.) “I think many, many families and certainly the majority of young people today are questioning the return on investment for higher education.”

In Tennessee, the state’s overall community college enrollment took a hit during the pandemic, despite a 2015 state program that made community college tuition free. But at TCAT, a network of 24 colleges across the state that offers training for 70 occupations, many trade programs have continued to grow. At TCAT Nashville, several programs have waiting lists, and the college has been adding night classes to meet demand, says Nathan Garrett, president of the college.

TCAT focuses on training students for jobs that are in demand in the region, which appeals to many students in normal times, but Mr. Garrett says the pandemic may have underscored the need for workforce relevance.

“When we look at ‘essential workers,’ a lot of those trades never saw a slowdown,” he says. “They still hired, they still have the need.” Automotive trades are always in demand, he adds.

Even so, Mr. Jones’s pursuit of a degree at TCAT Nashville would perhaps be a surprise to his high school self. “I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted to do,” he says, “and my biggest fear was to go to college, put in all that time and effort and then not use my degree.”

So, at 18, he went to work in warehouses, spending long days loading and unloading heavy boxes from tractor-trailers. But after just a few years, he realized he needed a job that would make him happier, hurt him less, and pay him more. Trade school for a career fixing cars, he decided, seemed like the best route.

Nineteen-year-old Robert Nivyayo’s priorities became clear a bit earlier in his education, when he realized he didn’t like high school. He said he spent most of his free time watching YouTube videos about fixing up cars before he was even licensed to drive.

Training in auto collision repair made sense for him, he says, because he could earn a credential while doing what he enjoyed, and without spending much time in the traditional classroom. He’s looking forward to the anticipated payoff, when he gets a job in an auto shop. He can expect to make roughly $40,000 to $60,000 a year, depending on the shop, his instructor says.

“Every new day, I just get more motivated,” Mr. Nivyayo says.

Just a few doors down, Abbey Carlson is in the welding studio, wearing jeans with holes burnt through them and a cap to protect her hair. She’s the only woman in the nighttime welding class.

Ms. Carlson, now 24, had initially intended to attend a four-year college, but her plans were derailed by an addiction to alcohol. After dedicating herself to recovery, she decided to pursue a career in the trades.

After researching her options, she concluded that welding would be the safest path to take as a young woman while also offering her the highest eventual earning potential, she says. So far, she’s enjoying her time at TCAT Nashville.

“Finally, I feel like I’m going to accomplish something in life,” she says.

Laura Monks, president of the Shelbyville branch of TCAT, says one of the reasons TCAT appeals to students is the school’s “co-op” program, which gives students who are nearing graduation the chance to work in their desired field a few days a week while also getting credit toward their diploma.

Brayden Johnson, 20, who is in his fifth trimester studying industrial maintenance automation, has had the chance to work as an electrical maintenance technician in a local factory that makes tubes for toothpaste. He’s working the night shift, which comes with a slight pay bump, and is earning about $26 per hour.

He hopes to stay in the job after he finishes at TCAT this spring, he says.

Mr. Garrett of TCAT Nashville, which also runs a co-op program, says students are drawn to the hands-on design of the courses and the general philosophy that “You need to get your hands on the equipment, you need to start building stuff, breaking stuff, and then learn how to fix that stuff.”

The opportunity to get real work experience before they graduate is an extra perk. The employer reports back to the student’s instructor so they know where the student is excelling and where they are struggling and can work on those weaknesses in class, Mr. Garrett says.

Ms. Eddy of ASA says the increased interest in the trades doesn’t necessarily mean these students won’t later go on to earn bachelor’s degrees, but that “they are excited, and they’re more interested in getting into something where they can feel as though they are applying their skills and their talents to something that they can be good at.”

For Mr. Jones, the TCAT Nashville student, the game plan is to transform his car by the time he graduates, and have fun while doing it.

“It’s school, and I take it seriously. But you know, you come here, and it just feels more like you’re at a shop hanging out with your homies all day,” he says. “It’s a good feeling.”

After he graduates, he hopes to get a job in an auto body shop.

And he says he’ll keep working until someday he can afford a red 1982 Nissan Skyline R31, RS Turbo with bronze wheels – his dream car. Even if he can’t get one in perfect condition, at least he’ll know how to fix it up.

Editor’s note: This story about trade school programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, as part of the series Saving the College Dream, a collaboration between Hechinger and Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, AL.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Seattle Times, and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Despite Sudan Fighting, A Society Reshapes Itself

As military factions battle in the streets for power, pro-democracy groups still work behind the scenes.

BY THE CHRISTIAN SCIECE MONITOR EDITORIAL

Just a few days ago, civil society and military leaders in Sudan were poised to set the African nation on a carefully negotiated path back to democracy. Instead the country’s two top generals, who joined forces to seize power 18 months ago, have turned on each other.

The fighting that erupted Saturday comes at a time when the Horn of Africa is already dealing with multiple security challenges. Yet rather than marking the end of popular hopes for a return to civilian government in Sudan, the outbreak between the rival military factions shows how deeply rooted those democratic aspirations have become. As a doctor in Khartoum, the capital, told Le Monde today, “this is not our war.”

Across Africa, an uptick in coups in recent years has strengthened pro-democracy movements and efforts to instill democratic values in African armed forces. In the past five years, 26 African countries have joined in an association of parliamentary committees working to strengthen civilian military oversight. African civilian and military leaders, meanwhile, are working through regional security blocs and the African Union to professionalize armed forces under civilian command.

Those efforts, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies notes, reflect an attempt to earn public trust by instilling values such as “integrity, honor, expertise, sacrifice, and respect for citizens” in African militaries. They mirror public attitudes. The latest Afrobarometer survey of attitudes about democracy found that, across 34 countries, 68% of Africans prefer democracy to any other system of government, while large majorities reject military rule (74%) or one-person rule (77%).


Tellingly, in countries where militaries have seized power in recent years, the generals have felt compelled to promise transitions back to democracy. In Sudan, one of the warring generals admitted last year that the coup he backed in 2021 was wrong. The other said, “soldiers belong in the barracks, and parties go to elections.”

Negotiated transitions in countries that have fallen recently under military rule have met repeated delays and obstacles. A constitutional referendum in Mali, for instance, was indefinitely postponed in March. Yet for the democratic forces set in motion by African coups in recent years, such setbacks have strengthened resolve.

“The Malian population has enormous energy and appetite for a change,” Korotoumou Thera, executive director of a Malian civil society group for women, told the United States Institute of Peace last week. Organizations like hers, she said, “act as cement in the consolidation of peace and security.”

The outbreak of fighting in Sudan has raised united calls from the international community for a swift return to peaceful negotiations. But for Sudan’s civil society groups, the power struggle between two warring generals is almost secondary. Their work of building a society shaped by democratic values goes on.

Letter From South Africa: What Melania Could Have Seen

Image: Carlo Allegri/Reuters via The Christian Science Monitor

BY RYAN LENORA BROWN

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

As first lady Melania Trump zig-zagged across Africa last week, the trip, at first, seemed largely without fanfare.

She held round-faced babies at a Ghanaian hospital and doled out books and soccer balls at an overcrowded Malawian school. She listened in solemn horror as a guide told her the history of Cape Coast Castle, a slave fort in Ghana, and laughed as she was nearly knocked over by a baby elephant she was bottle-feeding at a sanctuary in Kenya.

And then she put on the hat.

As Mrs. Trump prepared to board the safari vehicle that would take her on a jaunt through Nairobi National Park last Friday, she donned a white pith helmet – the domed, buckled hat fashionable among European colonists in Africa and Asia. (Think Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa.”)

Immediately, the internet was aghast. Had the first lady just made a sartorial nod to the good old days of colonialism, in full view of the world?

The next day, in front of the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, she tried to redirect the conversation.

“I want to talk about my trip and not what I wear,” Trump told the huddle of reporters traveling with her. “That’s very important, what I do, what we’re doing with [development agency] USAID, my initiatives and I wish people would focus on [that].”

In a sense, Trump was right to be irked. Critics had been looking for days for clues that the first lady didn’t really care about Africa, a region that her husband has mostly ignored – and occasionally mocked – during his presidency. They scrutinized her scripted visits to schools, tourist sites, and presidential palaces, where she was a quietly graceful visitor whose most common utterance seemed to be, “Thank you for having me.”

As a reporter working in Africa, I felt a flicker of sympathy for the first lady. Her choice of hat had been deeply silly, offensive even. But it likely was a gesture of ignorance, not malice. It simply mirrored the knowledge level of most people in the country where she lives – people for whom the helmet’s history was so unknown that it simply wouldn’t occur to them that she shouldn’t wear it.

Similarly, we often talk about Africa in such sweeping, at-arms-length terms that we might not pause when even thoughtful journalists refer to a country she visited, Malawi, as “obscure.” (Obscure, one wonders, to whom?) Or when all of Africa – a continent of 50-some countries and a billion people – is referred to as “vast and impoverished,” or when people who live there are “beloved and admired for having deep joy and resilience, in the face of issues like widespread poverty, disease and technological isolation, as is seen in some African countries.”

Indeed, one of the hardest things for me about reporting on this continent is that we are given a tacit permission to be simplistic, because few people challenge that view. And each time a figurehead visits to do charity and look at wildlife, they reinforce these perspectives. I suspect that Africa has long been a popular destination for first ladies, in particular, because it seems on the surface like a ready-made backdrop for American goodwill. It looks, from some angles, like an entire continent full of poor people and poor countries eager to be on the receiving end of American goodness. Often, as in Trump’s case, those recipients are children, a particularly sympathetic group. (Her trip was built around the “Be Best” campaign promoting children’s well-being.)

As I watched Trump’s trip from my home in Johannesburg, I wished that I could take her on a different kind of Africa jaunt. In the Ghanaian capital, Accra, for instance, I might have suggested she duck out of the presidential palace and pay a visit to a few artists’ workshops in the neighborhood of Teshie. There, she could have seen the sometimes wacky, sometimes profound whimsicality of the country’s famous coffin builders, who sculpt caskets in shapes ranging from cola bottles to lions to human-sized cell phones. In Kenya, instead of packing her day with visits to orphanages – first one for elephants, then one for humans – Trump could have taken a detour to the outskirts of the capital to meet Tegla Loroupe, a tiny powerhouse of a woman who broke nearly every distance running record in the world, and when she finished doing that, just as quickly began giving the money away. (Philanthropy, Trump could have pointed out to the Americans watching back home, can be homegrown, too.)

I think she might have even enjoyed the quintessentially West African experience of sitting in wheezing peak-hour traffic instead of speeding around it in her motorcade, watching as hawker after hawker streams by your car with a veritable supermarket of goods – donuts! Air fresheners! Inflatable pools! – balanced on their heads. The whole thing might have been a reminder of how hard and how creatively people work to survive any place where the system seems stacked against them.

I wish, in short, she could have seen Africa as I am privileged to be able to see it every day – as a staggeringly diverse and maddeningly complicated place. For me, unlearning the things America taught me about Africa will probably be a lifelong endeavor. I am still surprised by my own surprise at hearing, for instance, that Rwanda has three times the percentage of female legislators as the United States, that eastern Congo is well known for its cheesemakers, or that a bunch of teenage girls in South Sudan can kick my butt at dodgeball. Believing that a society or country or community can be many things at once – some of them dissonant and contradictory – is a privilege we grant freely to the places we come from. So why can we not also hold multiple Africas in our head as well?

The Africa Melania saw last week wasn’t fake. There are, in many countries on this continent, too many children crowded into underserved schools. There are too many animals being killed by poachers. There are too many dying babies.

But there are also artists and philanthropists and complicated, contradictory societies stumbling forward in the world. The same as in the United States. The same as everywhere.

Perhaps this trip – and that hat – will be the beginning of Trump’s own unlearning. If so, she and I are in that together.

In Ghana, A Feminist Push For Fairer Farming

BY STACEY KNOTT

Christabel Afrane Image Via CSM/Stacey Knott

ACCRA, GHANA (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR) -- Female farmers are often held back by higher barriers to funding, land, and materials. But when they're empowered, they're not the only ones who benefit.

Christabel Afrane holds a plump chicken under her arm as she checks her boxes for eggs. The rest of her Rhode Island Reds cluck at her heels – every turn she makes, they follow.

She bought the birds to prove she practices what she preaches to girls in Ghana: that there is money and empowerment in agriculture; and that when a woman succeeds, everyone benefits.

In Mrs. Afrane’s home country, Ghana, women produce the majority of food. But female farmers in Africa tend not to reap what they sow, held back by higher barriers to funding, land, and materials than men encounter. It’s part of why so many eke out a living as low-scale subsistence farmers – a trend she’s seen firsthand.


When Afrane’s grandmother, Mary Akua Ago, lost her husband, she had to walk two hours to her farm and back each day – planting, weeding, and harvesting only to feed her family. She used to have a plot close to her home, but when her husband died it went to his family, leaving her no other option to provide food for her eight children.

Watching her grandmother’s struggle, Afrane wondered: “How can you support this woman, or a young girl, who is moving heaven and earth to survive?”

Today, Afrane is on a quest to bring more women into agriculture, and support them once they’re there. When their opportunities grow, so do their profits – along with their yields, and their own ability to lift up other women. She’s not alone: from individuals to international NGOs, there is a growing emphasis across the continent for equality in farming.

There’s Mavis Nduchwa, whose animal farm in Botswana trains unemployed single mothers in poultry management. There’s Professor Ruth Oniang’o, joint winner of the 2017 African Food Prize, who has spent decades advocating for women in the sector. There’s even been a reality TV show about boosting female farmers in Tanzania: Female Food Heroes, sponsored by Oxfam.

They’re not empowering women for fairness alone, they say – though that’s important – but to better feed the world.
Chicken power

Women make up more than half of Ghana’s agricultural labor force, according to a 2014 study from the nongovernmental organization SEND-Ghana, and produce 70 percent of Ghana’s food stock. But just 10 percent of Ghana's female farmers own land, compared to 23 percent of men, and the average value of women’s land holdings is three times lower. Women are also largely locked out of obtaining financial services, due to limited education and mobility, and other social and cultural barriers, according to the study.


In 2015, when Afrane set up the Kairos Ladies Network, she wanted to forge a new path for women. She goes to schools where she and other female entrepreneurs speak about the benefits of working in the sector, shifting students’ impressions of it from small-scale farms to bigger agribusiness. She also organizes farm visits, including to her own. She believes the encouragement will offer a path to economic independence that could go a long way to ensure future equality, too, and feeding the nation.

On her property on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana’s capital, Afrane’s poultry farm has three sheds where 1,700 chickens and roosters cluck, crow, and lay. She sells about $2,100 worth of eggs each month, and plans to sell some of the chickens at Christmastime – offering a local alternative in an import-heavy sector. The farm has about ten employees – including her husband. It’s a story she hopes will inspire young women to reimagine what “agriculture” means, shifting away from the subsistence farming her own grandmother still practices.
'I see money on the field'

Abena Abedi is a rice farmer – large-scale. She buys about 200 tons of rice each year, supporting 88 small farms in Ghana’s eastern Volta region. Struggling smallholders generally don’t own the land they cultivate; farms are usually two acres or smaller. Ms. Abedi, an agricultural science graduate, provides them with training and technical support – the kind of help she wanted to provide when she first entered the industry.


Today, as a member of the Kairos Ladies Network, she speaks to young women about how they can build their own careers in agriculture. Female farmers’ challenges, in particular, stand out to her, so she focuses on working with them. Women tell her they can now pay school fees, and their livelihoods are improving. But often, she has to justify why she chooses to work in agriculture – which confuses male farmers in particular.

“Sometimes the farmers will ask why I am doing what I am doing. They think I am educated and look sophisticated – more than them – so I could go and sit in some office and stop wasting my time on the field,” she says with a laugh.

“I see money on the field,” she tells the farmers she works with, and works to help them realize the same.


Seeing money in farming is crucial to attract young women. But so is improving the livelihoods of those already in the sector.

This includes reducing the “drudgery,” allowing women time for other economic activities, says Jemimah Njuki, a senior program officer at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a Canadian government-funded development agency.

In Malawi and Zambia, where women are usually responsible for drying and smoking fish, the IDRC funded solar drying tents, reducing the time women spent watching and turning them. The tents also produce better-quality fish, so women can sell it at higher prices and to new markets.

Feminist food

More women getting their fair share in agriculture is a win for everyone, Dr. Njuki says.

“If you put a dollar in the hands of women, 90 cents is going to be put back into the family,” she says. “Children are going to go to school – especially girls are going to go to school. Nutrition in the household is going to improve. That is the power of women with money. They multiply it, they extend it. It benefits the extended family, it benefits the community.”

They can also alleviate world hunger, she adds, citing a United Nations report. Giving women the same opportunities as men would increase their productivity by up to 30 percent, improving overall output in developing countries by up to 4 percent – which translates to reducing the number of undernourished people worldwide by 150 million.


She’s excited for the future, especially as young people bring new innovations and technology to the sector. But for young women to progress, they’ll need the resources that have traditionally proven difficult to access across the continent, like land and financing.

“Banks and financial institutions need to see them as business people, not just young women,” she says. “The way they think about collateral for young women and young people generally has to change.”

Efforts like Afrane’s are going to help, Njuki adds.

“What we know now is the future of agriculture is going to be young. The future of our continent is going to be female. There will be more women, whether it’s in agribusiness, whether it's in research or policy, and the more people start seeing women in those places where they had been absent, the more things are going to change.”

As Global Famine Aid Comes Up Short, Somalis Abroad Step Up

BY RYAN LENORA BROWN

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Image: Feisal Omar/Reuters

APRIL 18, 2017 JOHANNESBURG—Long before major international pleas for anti-drought funding in Somalia began, or images of the gaunt and hungry started to circulate in the world’s newspapers, Amir Sheikh knew exactly what was happening. For months, the news had been coming to him by Facebook and WhatsApp, by email and over scratchy phone lines from Mogadishu: the country was parched, people were dying. And if money didn’t arrive – lots of it, and soon – things were going to get worse very quickly.

So Mr. Sheikh, who heads up the Somali Community Board of South Africa, did what he always does when he receives news like this from home. He sounded the alarm.

He sent volunteers to talk to business owners in “Little Mogadishu,” a street in Johannesburg’s Mayfair neighborhood crowded with Somali coffee shops and internet cafes, and gathered money collected by small groups of concerned Somali women. He began asking restaurants about hosting fundraisers and reached out to other migrant communities in the city for help.


“It is not hard for us to reach people in Somalia because it is where we come from,” he says. “We are locals, we are not afraid.”

In February, the United Nations declared a famine in parts of South Sudan, and warned that three more nearby countries in the midst of their own severe droughts – Somalia, Nigeria, and Yemen – were precariously close. To stop them from tipping over into catastrophe, the agency’s humanitarian chief said, it needed to raise $4.4 billion by July. Meanwhile, the US, which supports almost one-fourth of the UN's funding, is reportedly seeking deep program cuts.

“There are people [in need] who we are not assisting because of funding in every country we work in,” says Challiss McDonough, the senior regional communications officer for the United Nations World Food Programme in East Africa. In Somalia alone, she estimates, the agency needs $209 million more than it currently has in its coffers in order to reach the 6.2 million people at risk of famine.

But in a world worn down by what UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien recently called “the largest humanitarian crisis” since the second World War, there is one group that has never stopped giving – Somalia’s diaspora.

A country of 10.8 million people, cut apart by nearly three decades of civil war, Somalia has one of the world’s most scattered populations: at least 2 million people born in the country now living beyond its borders, to say nothing of their children and grandchildren. But beyond its size, the vast constellation of Somali communities spread from Minneapolis to London to Johannesburg stands out for another characteristic: generosity.

Every year, Somalis abroad send about $1.4 billion home – or a quarter of the country’s GDP – making them Somalia’s largest provider of aid. Somali-Americans send an average of $3,800 per year, for example, while Somalis in Germany send more than $4,000 and those in Saudi Arabia send about $1,500.


And that money travels through highly intimate channels, almost always moving directly from donor to recipient with few or no people in between.

“People know exactly what happens to the money they send because they can just call up their relatives in the village and ask what’s happening and where it’s gone,” says Ayan Ashur, the ambassador to Britain for Somaliland, a self-governing breakaway state that is recognized internationally as an autonomous region in Somalia’s north. “It’s a more accountable way to donate because it’s so personal.”

That also means that in times of crisis like the current drought, Somalis are among the country’s most efficient and effective sources of relief, able to identify need, move money, and analyze impact faster than almost anyone else.


During Somalia's 2011 famine, for instance, personal social networks – including diaspora connections and remittances – became a crucial factor in how well people and communities coped with the disaster, as international aid groups struggled to respond, according to a report from Tufts University's Feinstein International Center. The better connected you were to people who weren’t experiencing the same crisis, in short, the more likely you were to survive it.

But that also meant that the diaspora, like other aid groups, was at times unable to reach those who need help the most – the marginalized and poorly connected, as well those living in areas controlled by the Islamist militant group Al Shabaab. More than 250,000 Somalis died during the 2011 famine, the worst of the 21st century; half of them were children. And Somalis' ability to send money home has become increasingly uneven over the past few years, with several banks across the US, Europe, and Australia refusing to make the transfers into the country for fears of being penalized for inadvertently supporting terrorism or money laundering.

Still, for many in the region, waiting for other forms of aid is hardly an option. The United Nations has blamed slow international response, in part, for the 2011 tragedy, and is anxious not to see history repeat itself. Today, 20 million people are living in drought-hit areas of Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan, and Nigeria, according to the UN, which warned last month that it had raised just one-tenth of the funds required to prevent famine.


“Internationally, it took so long and there is still so little” in the way of aid in Somaliland, Ms. Ashur says. “The diaspora has been reacting since November, where we only saw the international community begin to come in around March. I think it’s fair to say this situation would be so much worse if this diaspora had not been active.”

For Brooklyn-based fashion designers Idyl and Ayaan Mohallim and a group of their Somali-American friends, seeing the news from home was like hearing the echoes of history.

“This cycle of famines and droughts has been going on for our entire lives,” Idyl Mohallim says. “We already know too well what the consequences are if help doesn’t get to Somalia sooner rather than later.”


So in early March, she and her friends cobbled together a short video explaining the need for aid in the country, and threw it onto a hastily-assembled GoFundMe fundraising page. They circulated it among friends and family, and by early April, they had raised more than $25,000.

Part of the reason for the fundraiser’s brisk success, Ms. Mohallim speculates, was the fact that the organizers could vouch personally for the charities they had decided to donate their funds to – groups they had worked and traveled with in the past, and whose work they knew well.

“I think people want to be involved but just have no idea how, or feel there’s no way they can change a crisis like that,” she says. “We are giving people both a way to take part and that accountability that the money is going where it needs to be.”


But like Sheikh in Johannesburg and Ashur in London, the organizers don’t feel the work they’ve done is anything newsworthy.

For Somalis, after all, this kind of charity is the norm. In their community, they say, not giving what you can, whenever you can, would be the glaring exception.

“Culturally, this is all very ordinary to us,” Mohallim says.

A modern, wired university grows in Nigeria

Two students focus on their work in a laboratory on the campus of the American University of Nigeria.Courtesy of American University of Nigeria

BY JACK RODOLICO/LATITUDE NEWS/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

It’s tough to get an Internet connection in northern Nigeria. That’s why Google was surprised to see – on their user map, where they track the locations of people Googling around the world – a big bright dot of activity in the Nigerian city of Yola, right on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.

Nigeria has 170 million people, the most populous country in Africa and 7th largest in the world. But Yola has fewer than 100,000 people, and is close to the home of the Boko Haram terrorist group.

So when Google sent a team out to Nigeria last fall to figure out who was doing all that Googling, the California-based company was surprised to find a scene right out of an American college campus. In fact, they sort of did stumble on an American university – the American University of Nigeria (AUN).

According to AUN’s president, American Margee Ensign, Google was pleasantly surprised to find the campus.

“Google told us we were 55 percent of their traffic in the whole country,” Ensign says.

Latitude News caught up with Ensign as she was traveling from California to Nigeria. During a brief layover in Belgium, Ensign talked about what it meant to be an “American-style” university in a country associated in many people’s minds with spammers and Boko Haram.

AUN is the youngest American-style university abroad. The American University of Beirut was founded when Andrew Johnson was president in 1866. The American University in Bulgaria was founded in 1991, shortly after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. These schools, along with their counterparts in Rome, Cairo and the Caribbean island of St. Maarten, offer a liberal arts education – easy to come by in the US, but not so in other parts of the world.

AUN does not have an explicit connection with these other universities, although it has received critical support from American University in Washington DC. The Nigerian school, which opened its doors to students in 2005, was the brainchild of Nigeria’s former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who credits the Peace Corps for inspiring him to found the school.

As a child, Abubakar was orphaned in a town near Yola, right around the time Nigeria gained independence from Britain.

“[Abubakar] had American Peace Corps teachers and British teachers,” Ensign says. “He has said to me and others the British teachers slapped his hands and said, ‘Repeat after me,’ and the Peace Corps teachers actually asked his opinion.”

Ensign says Abubakar’s fortune ”is coming to the university.”

By Nigerian standards, the university is a hub for technology and infrastructure. Ensign says the campus is home to the largest building in northern Nigeria, and is the country’s only university with electricity around the clock. Students get laptops and have wireless, another unusual feature at a Nigerian university.

“We’re an entirely eBook community, all on iPads,” Ensign says, “and we’re introducing that same technology to a very poor community.”

“I would like to show the world that this technology can be used anywhere and can really allow people to leapfrog the challenges of poverty and illiteracy,” she adds.

AUN’s infrastructure is utilized by young Nigerians (and, increasingly, Rwandans, Ugandans, and Cameroonians) who are eager to pursue a liberal arts education. Like most American universities, undergraduate students study a diverse range of courses for two years, then focus on one field for their remaining two years. The campus is also home to a graduate program and a K-12 school – and a small army.

“When I was recruited for this position, like many, I was quite skeptical and worried about coming to Nigeria,” says Ensign.

Even though she feels at home now, Ensign says she faces constant, atypical challenges. Last week, there was a boa constrictor on campus.

“We had to deal with the local snake charmer,” Ensign says. She adds that in northern Nigeria, a big snake is a small challenge compared with “a terrorist organization about 100 miles from the university.”

The charmer got rid of the snake. A 350-person security force is there for the rest.

The security force, one-third of whom are women, are there to protect the 1,400 students and 90 or so faculty from Boko Haram, an Islamist group labeled as a terrorist group by the US government.

Ensign wouldn’t speak to specific threats from Boko Haram, instead saying the security force is there as a precautionary measure. She says students do not live under the constant threat of violence.