Saudi Arabia will stop providing scholarships for students to attend a number of universities in the United States, the Middle East, and elsewhere, the country’s Ministry of Higher Education announced, reports Eurasia Review. The ministry did not name the universities. The move follows a suggestion by the Saudi Arabian higher-education minister that graduate-level scholarships for Saudi students in Australia should be limited to Australia’s elite universities. On Wednesday, the local newspaper Al-Watan said that Saudi enrollment at universities around the world had exceeded official quotas. (The quota levels were not specified.) The decision to limit scholarships will take effect in 2011. “The piling up of Saudi students in these universities means that they will not benefit from their studies, and average grades will go down. Hence there will be no more approvals for Saudi students to go to these universities,” a ministry spokesman said.
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3 Responses to Saudi Arabia to Limit Scholarships for Students at Foreign Universities
dank48 - August 23, 2010 at 9:19 am
Was anyone expecting any of that to make sense?
11200222 - August 23, 2010 at 1:14 pm
I was expecting it to make sense, but unfortunately, it doesn’t. How does a “piling up of Saudi students” mean that they will not benefit from their studies, and force their grades down? Are they having too many parties with their many Saudi fellow students, thereby distracting themselves?
universityplacement - August 23, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Though very vague, I believe the gist of this is that the Ministry of Higher Education will be, sometime in the future, releasing a list of schools to which it will no longer provide scholarships. They have already done this once–you can find an addendum list of 20 universities on their website which, though approved, they will no longer give students scholarships to attend. As in this article, they cited numbers of students as the reason for withdrawing scholarships to these schools. I believe the idea is that if there is a large number of a certain nationality at a campus, that group can make its own sub-culture. If this happens, then the group could decrease its involvement in campus activities and speak their own language more, thus not receiveing the full benefit of international education. While I do not agree with this kind of thinking, it, I’ve encountered it quite frequently.