More on KAUST

The groundbreaking of KAUST was the biggest news in Saudi Arabia during the past two weeks. King Abdullah officially broke ground for the promising project in a huge event attended by thousands of dignitaries. I wasn’t invited, but fellow blogger John Burgess was there and he wrote about it here.

Since I have been offline for the past few days I have not closely followed what has been said about it, but I have written previously about KAUST, way before anyone in the local media had the slightest idea what the acronym KAUST stands for. I have a few more things to say, though, so here it goes.

kaust_logo There is no doubt that if KAUST delivered all of its promises, it will be the most important achievement that King Abdullah will be remembered by, and many people here feel that the king is very determined to make it happen. But not all people are excited, as some are afraid that a huge project like KAUST could be plagued by the three common symptoms of higher education institutions in the country: corruption, bureaucracy and mismanagement. Now I don’t want to be skeptical, but I think a certain amount of skepticism is required to keep people’s feet on the ground in order to turn big dreams like this one into reality.

Nevertheless, most of the initial indications are good. For example, KAUST will be independent from MOHE. Actually I was surprised that MOHE was not involved in the project at all, but it was a good kind of surprise as MOHE never really impressed me. It was Saudi Aramco who engineered this project from scratch. Despite what many people, including some Aramco employees, say about how Aramco changed to the worse after the Americans left, it remains one of the few government bodies that I trust and expect to preform excellently.

Now I have speculated before that megaprojects such as KAUST and the new economic cities might change the culture of the country. However, it seems that such change may not be a result but rather a condition for these projects to success.

For instance, Saudi Arabia used to be a very closed society with a what can be viewed as hostility towards foreign ideas. On the day after groundbreaking, KAUST hosted a special academic symposium discussing the role of the research university in the 21st century, and the keynote speaker was Dr. Charles Vest, President of the National Academy of Engineering and President Emeritus of MIT, who said: “science can flourish only in an open environment.”

It is the hope that KAUST would produce a positive effect on the economy, education and culture of the Saudi society, but hope is not enough. This a huge undertaking to our country and there is a lot of hard work to be done here by everyone. Let’s not blow it.

US Visa Web Chat for Saudi Students

For Saudi students who would like to pursue education in the United States, the US Embassy in Riyadh offer you a chance for a web chat with Council Kathleen Riley to talk about the visa application process. According to the Embassy website, she will discuss how to schedule an appointment for a visa interview, the documents that students should bring for their interviews, and the entry and registration requirements for Saudi students studying in the U.S. The discussion will take place on September 9th at 15:30, and you can join in here, but you need first to login using the address: student_visa@state.gov. No password is needed.

Thinking Outside the Box

Are student councils becoming a trend on Saudi campuses?

In short: No. Just because three universities in the Kingdom, two of them private, have decent student councils does not mean such thing has become a trend. Just take a look at the country’s oldest university: except for the occasional lame religious activities, student councils in KSU are either inactive or nonexistent. The rise of Sahwa in the ’80s and ’90s have brought most, if not all, non-religious activities on the campus to a nearly complete halt.

Of course most people outside don’t know anything about this because, unfortunately, my university is a locked box. And after studying here for four years, I can tell you for sure that the atmosphere and culture of KSU does not encourage its students (and staff) to think outside the box.

More is Less?

Since I’m fasting these days to compensate for the week I spent in Jeddah last Ramadhan, I was still up at the early hours of the day and decided to take a quick tour on the headlines before going to sleep. This item in Arab News was particularly of interest to me:

More Saudi Pharmacists Needed

Saudi Arabia requires more than 100,000 pharmacy graduates to replace the foreign workers employed in hospitals and other establishments in both the private and government sectors, according to an expert in the field of pharmacy and medical education in the Kingdom.

Being a pharmacy student, my interest in this item should not be surprising. Sure, knowing there is a huge demand for pharmacists should be assuring and make me feel comfortable about my future, but truth is, reading this has left me confused rather than assured.

Why confused, you might ask? The answer is: because my brother has graduated with a degree in pharmacy since the beginning of this year, yet he still can’t find a job. Despite the fact that he has had his degree from a college managed by the Ministry of Health, he could not find a job in their hospitals or in any of the private hospitals where he went seeking employment.

I really can’t see where the real problem lies here. If there is this huge demand on pharmacists in the country, how come my brother and a large number of his colleagues are still sitting frustrated in their homes after knocking every door only to return disappointed? Today, my brother is going to KFU to apply for a job there after he read in the newspaper that they were seeking employees for a few health-related positions. Will he get the job? Considering the limited seats and the competition his chance might seem slim, but I want to wish him all the best. Good luck Hasan.

KAUST and KEC: The Future of Saudi Arabia

I have previously posted about the album I compiled for images of the new projects under development in Saudi Arabia. One of the projects that does not appear there is King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which is described as a unique world-class graduate research university that will provide significant support for scientific discovery and human advancement within Saudi Arabia, the region and around the globe.

The core campus, located on more than 36 million square meters on the Red Sea near Rabigh, is set to open in September 2009. This project, as well as Knowledge Economic City (KEC) in nearby Medina, show some features of the future face of this country. It is the hope that such megaprojects would achieve their goals and help our nation to move forward. You can see more pictures in the virtual tour KAUST website provides here.

Misleading Figures

Tariq al-Maeena points out to ~~some~~ many flaws in our education system. He, as usual, makes some valid points there, but the thing that I want to emphasize here is numbers. “Although the figures being touted by the Ministry of Education on the number of graduates annually may provide them a false sense of pride, very little is debated on the quality and marketability of these graduates,” he wrote. Unfortunately, this problem is common in all of our educational institutes.

Take KSU, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary and where yours truly is studying, for example. They always brag about the fact that more 60,000 students, male and female, are studying at the university at any given time in the past few years. No one, however, dares to ask about the quality of education these students receive there. I have been studying there for the past four years, and I can tell you for sure that the word ‘quality’ does not mean much, if anything, in KSU.

Moreover, the false sense of pride over misleading figures is not restricted to education. Many government sectors here like to talk about such numbers without actually asking themselves what these numbers actually mean. Oh, and yes, out of the eight skills he mentions in his column, I got only two of them, and I’m not so good at any of these two. But of course, I don’t blame our education system because I already talked about how dysfunctional it is, so I only have myself to blame :-( (via xrda)

On Unemployment in Saudi Arabia

One of the most pressing questions of last year was about the state of unemployment and if the worries on that regard were realistic and justified. The issue was more and more in the limelight especially after the efforts of the Ministry of Labor (MOL) to employ more women in the workforce was faced by fierce opposition from many conservatives who argued, in one of their many invalid arguments, that MOL should first work to provide jobs for unemployed men before even thinking about women.

Of course some conservatives were simply trying to take cheap shots at the liberal minister of labor Dr. Ghazi Al Gosaibi. You can say whatever you want about him, but I think Al Gosaibi should not be blamed for the mistakes of the Ministry of Planning and our dysfunctional educational system, because thanks to them and only them we have an army of unskilled college graduates and high school dropouts who their sole dream is to become pencil-pushers as a part of the government bureaucratic machine in order to receive big money for doing nothing.

The ~~Ministry~~ lack of planning which caused unemployment in some sectors has also led to a very high demand of local human resources in some other sectors. Take healthcare for example: less than 20% of workers in healthcare are Saudis. Compare this to the very small number of graduates from medical colleges here and you have a real dilemma. It is said that with the current numbers of graduates we will need about 500 years to come anything near Saudization of the healthcare system. Ironically, the biggest spending in the national budget goes to education and healthcare .

It is not hopeless, though, or at least that’s the hope. We are enjoying a second boom, and the mega projects launched recently are impressive and promising but we should not repeat the mistakes of the first boom because we might never have another chance; we simply can’t afford it. I pray that the lessons were learned, and please let us not fool ourselves again. Let’s work, and let’s work hard. It’s about time.

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Category Education