Haiti

The university system is composed currently of four or five private institutions in addition to the State University of Haiti, which admits 2,000 students every year out of 13,000 to 16,000 applicants. The others receive 3,600 applications a year even though they can only take 1,780 students. The private universities have an attrition rate between 25 and 80 percent. All the institutions are located in the capital city. They offer a degree in law, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, engineering, agriculture and veterinary sciences, education, social sciences (mainly ethnology and psychology), economics, business administration, linguistics, international studies, and African studies.

At this level, also, relevancy remains a concern. The formation given to young scholars in Haiti seems to prepare them better to live and work in foreign countries than in their own. The content of the curriculum is not defined according to the needs of the nation. In general, the higher education system shows all the faults of the other levels: centralization, French orientation (a conscious effort is made to establish equivalency with the University of Paris for degrees granted by the University of Haiti), elitism, and insufficiency.