Panama

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Panama in a nutshell

(sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama)

Panama, officially the Republic of Panama (Spanish: República de Panamá), is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting the North America continent to the South America continent, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south.

Source : http://www.cia.gov

The population of Panama is 3.3 million.

The capital is Panama City.

Panama is an international business centre, and although it is only the fourth largest economy in Central America, after Guatemala, Costa Rica and El Salvador, it is the fastest growing economy and the largest per capita consumer in Central America.

Panama is divided into nine provinces, with their respective local authorities (governors) and has a total of ten cities. Also, there are four Comarcas (literally: "Shires") which house a variety of indigenous groups.

Education in Panama

(sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Panama)

Education in Panama is compulsory for the first six years of primary education. As of the 2004/2005 school year there were about 430,000 students enrolled in grades one through six (95% attendance). The total enrollment in the six secondary grades for the same period was 253,900 (60% attendance). More than 90% of Panamanians are literate.

Public education began in Panama soon after independence from Colombia in 1903. The first efforts were guided by an extremely paternalistic view of the goals of education. This elitist focus changed rapidly under United States influence.

By the 1920s, Panamanian education subscribed to a progressive educational system, explicitly designed to assist the able and ambitious individual in search of upward social mobility. Successive national governments gave a high priority to the development of a system of (at least) universal primary education; in the late 1930s, as much as one-fourth of the national budget went to education. Between 1920 and 1934, primary-school enrollment doubled. Adult illiteracy, more than 70 percent in 1923, dropped to roughly half the adult population in scarcely more than a decade.

By the early 1950s, adult illiteracy had dropped to 28 percent, but the rate of gain had also declined and further improvements were slow in coming. The 1950s saw essentially no improvement; adult illiteracy was 27 percent in 1960. There were notable gains in the 1960s, however, and the rate of adult illiteracy dropped 8 percentage points by 1970. According to 1980 estimates, only 13 percent of Panamanians over 10 years of age were illiterate. Men and women were approximately equally represented among the literate. The most notable disparity was between urban and rural Panama; 94 percent of city-dwelling adults were literate, but fewer than two-thirds of those in the countryside were--a figure that also represented continued high illiteracy rates among the country's Indian population.[2]

From the 1950s through the early 1980s, educational enrollments expanded faster than the rate of population growth as a whole and, for most of that period, faster than the school-aged population. The steepest increases came in secondary and higher educational enrollments, which increased ten and more than thirty times respectively. By the mid-1980s, primaryschool enrollment rates were roughly 113 percent of the primary-school-aged population. Male and female enrollments were relatively equal overall, although there were significant regional variations.

Enrollments at upper levels of schooling had increased strikingly both in relative and absolute terms since 1960. Between 1960 and the mid-1980s, secondary-school enrollments expanded some four-and-a-half times and higher education, nearly twelve-fold. In 1965 fewer than one-third of children of secondary school age were in school, and only 7 percent of people aged 20 to 24 years. In the mid-1980s, almost two-thirds of secondary-school-aged children were enrolled, and about 20 percent of individuals aged 20 to 24 years were in institutions of higher education.

Further and Higher education in Panama

There are five main university-level institutions (see below). Including smaller colleges, there are 88 institutions of higher education in Panama. For a list see http://www.4icu.org/pa/universities-panama.htm

Universities in Panama

As of 2010, more than 100,000 Panamanian students attended the five accredited universities:

[http://www.up.ac.pa/PortalUp/index.aspx Universidad de Panamá (UP)]. The University of Panama was founded on October 7, 1935, with a student body of 175 in the fields of Education, Commerce, Natural Sciences, Pharmacy, Pre-Engineering and Law. As of 2008[update], it maintains a student body of 74,059 distributed in 228 buildings around the country.

[http://www.utp.ac.pa/ Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá (UTP)]. The Technological University of Panama, Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá (UTP) in Spanish, is the second largest university in Panama. It is a state university comprising six faculties in seven campuses nationwide. The main campus is a 60-acre piece of land located in Panama City, the country’s capital city. UTP started operations as a Polytechnic Institute in 1975 offering programmes in electromechanical engineering, industrial engineering, civil engineering, computer systems engineering, and mechanical engineering. Six years later, UTP officially becomes a university consisting of five faculties (six, since 1996) - in 2011 there are extensive 30th anniversary celebrations.

[http://www.unachi.ac.pa/ Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí (UNACHI)], founded in 1995.

[http://www.udelas.ac.pa/ Universidad Especializada de las Américas (UDELAS)], founded in Panama in 1997 and focusing on education for special needs.

[http://usmapanama.com/ Universidad Católica Santa María La Antigua], a private Catholic university in Panama City, founded in 1966.

There is also the [http://www.ulat.ac.pa/es/index.php Universidad Latina de Panamá] which does not appear to have courses accredited by the Ministry. This is an offshoot of the Universidad de Costa Rica, founded in 1992.

Polytechnics in Panama

The [http://www.utp.ac.pa/ Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá (UTP)] developed from Polytechnic status, but is now a fully accredited university. There do not appear to be any designated Polytechnics currently in Panama.

Colleges in Panama

There are around 80 Centros y Institutos Superiores providing tertiary level vocational programmes - Técnicos (technician and higher technician level training). Some of these offer programmes in a broad range of vocational areas, but most are specialised, providing training for one employment sector only.

Quality assurance

The Ministry of Education has overall responsibility for accreditation aand quality assurance.

Post-secondary

The Ministry of Education approves and licenses courses and programmes at universities and Centros e Institutos Superiores.

ICT in education initiatives

Virtual initiatives in post-secondary education

Colegio Virtual offers a range of virtual courses - see separate entry

Interesting Programmes

• UNIEDPA
• Universidad Latino Americana de ciencias y tecnología

References

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