The Chronicle‘s editor, Jeffrey Selingo, is participating this week as moderator of a session at the 2nd Annual International Exhibition and Conference on Higher Education in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He’ll be filing a few posts based on his impressions of the conference and the visit.
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In the midst of protests sweeping across the Middle East this spring, and a worldwide economy that is still sputtering in many parts of the globe, hundreds of colleges from dozens of countries have flocked to Saudi Arabia’s capital city here this week for a college fair aimed at recruiting full-paying students from this country hungry to build its own higher-education system.
The main event of the 2nd International Exhibition and Conference on Higher Education is the fair, which covers more than 150,000 square feet of exhibition space. Institutions from more than 35 counties have booths in the space. It’s not surprising that colleges from two countries where government support for higher education is lagging take up much of the space: Britain and the United States.
The payoff could be big for those peddling their institutions here. Some 250,000 potential students are expected to descend on the exhibit hall over the three days of the conference. About 120,000 students are already studying outside the country, a number that the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education expects to double in the next five years. Best of all for these colleges is that the students come with full scholarships courtesy of the oil-rich kingdom.
Several dozen of the American college officials in Riyadh for the conference gathered Tuesday night for a reception at the home of the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James B. Smith. In remarks to the group, Mr. Smith emphasized that “you don’t have to be a big school to recruit students here.”
“What the King [Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz] wants are students spread throughout colleges across the U.S.,” the ambassador told the group gathered at tables around the pool on a warm evening. He gave three tips to those trying to recruit students: Emphasize family and safety, participation in student activities and the larger community, and talk about how the students could be ambassadors for their country.
But colleges from outside this kingdom are not alone in the competition for these students. Saudi Arabia’s own higher-education system is growing at breakneck pace in an effort to try to keep up with the young population here (median age: 19) and to force diversification of the economy (80 percent of the country’s revenues come from oil). A quarter of the country’s budget is now dedicated to education. New universities the size of cities are popping up around the kingdom. Spending on scientific research is expected to grow to 2 percent of the gross domestic product by 2025, from around 1.1 percent now (by contrast, the United States spends 2.6 percent of its GDP on such research).
Figuring out how to organize that increasingly sprawling higher-education system is a priority for government officials here. A sideshow to the vast exhibition is a conference that has brought together leading academic administrators from around the globe (paid for by the Ministry of Higher Education) to share their insights on the question of what makes a world-class university system.
The conference speakers include the president of Cornell University, David Skorton; the former president of the University of Virginia, John Casteen; the dean of the graduate school of education at Shanghai University, Nian Cai Liu; the former minister of higher education in the Netherlands, Jozef Ritzen; and the vice chancellor of Kingston University, Sir Peter Scott.
The first day of presentations focused on lessons that the kingdom’s leaders could learn from how various countries organize their higher-education systems and the role the institutions play in a knowledge-based economy.
One key to organizing the most efficient system that was discussed often on the first day was to differentiate the missions of groups of colleges or individual institutions themselves. But like higher-education officials elsewhere, many here are obsessed with rankings, and often colleges focus on what will make them rise in the rankings. The result is colleges that look more alike than different (a discussion of rankings will take up a part of Day 2 of the conference).
Saudi Arabia also runs the risk that in the name of organization it might stifle innovation. Dr. Skorton raised that point during a question-and-answer period, maintaining that the strength of the U.S. system is competition—for research dollars, faculty, and students. Yes, it might be inefficient at times, but competition makes everyone better rather than having a system where every institution’s destiny is planned by the central government.
