Moroccan students put classroom overcrowding ahead of digital gaps in infrastructure ranking

Moroccan university students ranked classroom overcrowding as the most urgent infrastructure issue in a new study published in Frontiers in Education, placing it ahead of outdated laboratory and computer equipment, weak library resources and insufficient digital infrastructure. The study combined responses from 200 students collected between March 27 and April 27, 2024, with assessments from 12 experts in higher education management, educational infrastructure and public policy, and used the TOPSIS decision-making method to generate comparative priority scores for each problem.

"The 200-person sample is insufficient to generalize the ranking across Morocco’s entire higher education system," the authors explicitly caution, highlighting important limits to the study's representativeness.

Study findings and methodology

Using TOPSIS to compare four infrastructure problems across five impact dimensions — learning conditions, student motivation, employability, access to information and digital inclusion — the model produced the following priority scores (comparative indicators, not national prevalence percentages):

• Classroom overcrowding: 0.7329
• Outdated laboratory and computer equipment: 0.6380
• Under-equipped libraries: 0.4228
• Inadequate digital infrastructure: 0.2547

The authors argue that overcrowded classrooms can reduce concentration, participation and interaction between students and teachers, while aging laboratory and computer equipment can leave students training on tools that no longer match professional requirements. Based on those assessments, the paper places expanding and better using classroom space alongside modernizing laboratories and computer facilities among the highest priorities for university infrastructure investment.

Context and limitations

Researchers combined the student survey with expert assessments to balance lived experience and managerial perspectives, but they note several caveats. Students were recruited through social media and other online platforms using convenience sampling rather than a nationally representative design, and responses came from a limited number of universities. That recruitment strategy, the authors warn, constrains the ability to extrapolate the rankings to Morocco’s entire higher-education system.

Despite ranking lower in the model, libraries and digital access are still included in the recommended investment agenda, the study says, signaling that weak library resources and inadequate digital infrastructure remain relevant concerns even if they scored below overcrowding and equipment.

Outlook

The paper concludes with a call for more comprehensive research: larger studies that cover a broader mix of public and private universities, capture regional differences and analyse the cost and expected return of different infrastructure investments. The authors’ explicit recommendation to expand the sample and geographic scope aims to produce findings that policymakers and university administrators can rely on when prioritizing capital and operational spending.

For now, the research supplies a data-driven argument that physical space and up-to-date technical equipment merit urgent attention in Morocco’s university investment agenda, while cautioning that further, more representative work is needed before the ranking can be applied nationally.