Higher education (HE) has never reached more than a tiny fraction of Mozambicans. In 1996, the country had only 40 HE students per 100,000, compared to 638 in Zimbabwe and 5,339 in the United States. The first institution was founded in 1962 and was upgraded to university status (University of Lourenço Marquez) in 1968. It was overwhelmingly white, with only 40 African students at the time of independence in 1975. Independence initially produced a huge exodus of staff and students, student numbers at the university falling from 2433 in 1975 to 750 at the renamed Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) in 1978. At that time there were only ten Mozambican teachers, with staff from the Communist bloc filling many of the vacancies; the university at this time has been described as, “truly a Tower of Babel”. The percentage of foreign teachers at the institution has steadily declined since then, to 33% in 1991, and then 14% in 2001. During the 1980s, many Mozambican students attended higher education instead in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.