Interpretation of perceived program effectiveness also adheres to personal,
economic, and political considerations. It is not surprising to discover that program
effectiveness was rated high within the realm of promoting better communication
between students. Such a result validates the findings within the previous section,
providing credence to the responses of the subjects within this study. The respondents,
however, showed least satisfaction with the scope of courses offered to them, especially
those related to political leadership, educational policy analysis, and problem solving
abilities. These results show uncanny similarity with those obtained by Alkhateeb et al.
(1998) in which satisfaction with courses related to educational policy was rated in the
bottom 10 percent of items related to satisfaction with program of study. Developed
countries became aware of this deficiency nearly four decades ago and the American
Association of School Administrators (AASA) developed new guidelines in the early
nineties to include political leadership and educational policy as major components of
educational administration preparation programs (Hoyle and AASA, 1993). To what
extent this anachronistic similarity is attributed to the fact that many of the faculty
who design educational administration preparation programs in developing countries
are the product of Western educational systems in the 1970s and 1980s, remains to be a
point of conjecture.