Starting with the 2023-24 academic year, UNA, a new higher education institute, is set to open its doors in Casablanca, aiming to offer high-quality academic and professional training.

In a press release released on Monday, the soon-to-be opened university stressed a desire to offer “high-quality training combining academic excellence, pedagogic innovation, professional immersion, and societal engagement.”

The UNA is set to offer Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in several areas, including management, engineering, computer science, law, and political science.

More specifically, the university will offer courses in financial engineering, digital marketing, as well as public and territorial management. The computer science faculty will offer courses in artificial intelligence, data analytics, and cybersecurity and personal data protection.

In addition to its Bachelor’s and Master’s programs, the university will also offer an Executive Center for professionals and workers wishing to acquire new skills and training.

The UNA’s research center will also encourage applied research and provide scholarships for students who display outstanding abilities.

The school has already outlined a detailed research policy on its website, explaining the parameters for its research projects in the different fields it will be teaching in.

For its first year, the university says 50 scholarships will be available to students for the 2023-2024 academic season.

Five pillars

The press release details how the UNA intends to train “new generations of specialized, performant, and competent” professionals. The university hopes its graduates will be job ready and will have skills in line with market expectations.

To this end, the university detailed five pillars it intends to implement.

First is academic excellence, which concerns the quality of study at the institute, which the university says will be ensured by highly qualified faculty and personalized supervision.

The second of the pillars is “work-study training,” which seeks to combine theory in education with immersion in professional settings, offering students up to two years of professional experience before their graduation.

The university’s website specifies that 100 work-study spaces will be made available to students to maximize their professional integration.

The university also seeks to promote values of international openness, which will see them forge partnerships with world-renowned institutions in order to promote intercultural understanding and give students the chance to move and study in different locations.

Notably, the university will offer courses in French as well as English, and international exchange programs as part of its bid to provide a more international version of higher education in Morocco.

The fourth pillar is “pedagogic transversality,” through which the university aims to allow students from different schools collaborate and approach topics through a multidisciplinary lens.

Finally, the university plans to prioritize soft skills and language mastery, seeing them as essential for professional integration, especially as the professional world becomes more global and tightly connected.

Societal engagement is one of the skills that the university is hoping to instill, as its website specifies that they aim to let their students understand their duties to the world and hold ethical values.

Leading figures

“The UNA project was initiated by education professionals with the aim of providing our country with a new university center of excellence that generates skills, where learning is fun and which is able to offer varied and real perspectives to its students,” UNA President Rachid M’Rabet said. 

“The purpose is training in trades and skills that ensure employability in a sustainable way and contribute to the influence of Morocco in Africa and internationally,” he added, according to the university’s press release.

M’Rabet is regarded as a leading figure in the field of higher education in Morocco, having been at the helm of the Superior Institute of Commerce and Enterprise Administration (ISCAE) for 20 years.

He will be one of the experts leading the university going forward, with the press release specifying that the institute plans to recruit several significant academic personalities, as well as professional leaders from around the world.

The university also said it has already established several national and international partnerships with similar academic institutions, as well as with businesses.

“It should be noted that the UNA has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with CDG Invest as part of its program ‘Generation Entrepreneurs’,” the UNA’s press release added.

UNA will begin its activities in September through its Atlantic Business School, and the Atlantic Engineering School, which are programs that are state-accredited.

The courses will take place in a 2,500 student campus in Sidi Maarouf, one of Casablanca’s premier business centers, making it easily accessible by public transport and giving students a large number of professional and formative experiences nearby.

The campus has been designed with high-quality training facilities that were “designed to foster creativity and interaction” and “provide an environment conducive to learning, as well as student and teacher development.”