One Exam, Two Realities: Shrinking Access to Higher Education in Ethiopia

Abstract

Following a civil war that ended in 2022, Ethiopia is now led by an increasingly authoritarian government. Historically, authoritarian governments have taken aim at higher education as the expansion of higher education is associated with democratic participation that threatens the government’s authority. Under the rationale of addressing widespread cheating, Ethiopia revised its college admissions exams in 2021. While this change was multifaceted, it altered both the content of the exam and the conditions of its administration, requiring all students to come to a public university for one week to take the exam. Following these changes, the percentage of students passing the exam has fallen from 60% to 3%, representing a dramatic contraction of access to higher education in Ethiopia. In this thesis, I explore how young Ethiopian women have experienced the new process of competing for a seat in higher education, and how those experiences vary by family socioeconomic background. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews, I found that students of higher and lower socioeconomic status experienced the exam differently. By requiring all students to report to and live at a centralized testing center for a week, limited free access to food and water and different treatment by federal police officers, provided more favorable conditions to students coming from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Private school students did not experience the same harsh treatment as public school students from federal police officers, had better access to safer food and had better scores on the exams. Students’ motivation and plans for the next chapter of their lives, post high school, was also heavily impacted by their experiences during the national exam which in return is intricately related to students’ socioeconomic background. In the past, testing conditions were similar across socioeconomic backgrounds, but with the new policy, testing conditions have become dependent on SES resulting in differing experiences for private and public school students as well as future outcomes. This thesis expands and complicates the current understanding of the effects of changing the conditions under which students compete for university seats on students’ achievement and access to higher education.