Higher Education in the Sultanate of Oman Today

Abstract

Drawing on Stephen Ball’s seminal work about social and education policy, this chapter critically discusses the decisions the Omani government made in pursuit of improving its higher education in the new millennium. Such developments came in the shape of establishing the Higher Education Admission Centre to facilitate awarding scholarships to students inland and abroad, specifically to English-speaking countries, as a part of the globalization and internationalization projects, establishing the Research Council to advance research and establishing the Oman Academic Accreditation Authority to control and advance the quality of education offered in the different academic institutions. This chapter draws on concepts like privatization, competition stat, performativity and new managerialism to critically examine their application to the Omani higher education system and the ideologies embedded in them. An identical methodological orientation to what was used in the previous chapter will be used here. Similarly, this chapter will try through data problematization as drawn from stories and existing archival data to draw implications about improving higher education in Oman.