Status of ABET Accreditation in the Arab World

Abstract

This work represents a short statistical survey of the ABET accreditation in the 22 Arab countries. The data about ABET accreditation are last-updated on October 1, 2017. We found that there are 11 Arab countries with ABET-accredited programs, totaling 358 programs. These programs are mostly at the bachelor level, and are housed in 62 institutions of higher education. In a descending order of the number of ABET accredited programs they have, these countries are: (1) Saudi Arabia, (2) United Arab Emirates, (3) Lebanon, (4) Kuwait, (5) Egypt, (6) Jordan, (7) Bahrain, (8 and 9) Palestine and Qatar, (10) Oman, and (11) Morocco. Only Saudi Arabia has ABET-accredited programs at the master’s level. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are the only countries in the list that have ABET-accredited programs at the associate (diploma, 2-year) level. To account for the large variation of population for the considered countries, a relative scale for comparisons is introduced on a per-capita basis, and we calculated it utilizing the United Nations population data of July 1, 2015. We found that the ABET capita index varies from 4.91 (Bahrain) to 0.05 (Morocco) for the considered 11 Arab countries