Riyadh newspaper Iread with great dismay a recent statement by the minister of higher education that sending Saudi students on scholarships abroad will stop one day. We have stopped it in the past when our resources were low, and the result was that we had a shortage of doctors and specialized academics. This was in addition to the fact that those who graduated from Saudi universities during that period were a burden on society because their fields of study and the way they were taught did not equip them to meet the needs of the job market. The situation was further compounded by the large number of graduates who majored in the humanities and social sciences, such as literature, sociology, history and geography. Moreover, for those who majored in the sciences, their studies were more theoretical than practical. Perhaps this was the impetus for the creation of the current scholarship program in which more than 100,000 students are currently studying abroad. The minister of higher education himself had stated that each one of them will find a job when he or she returned to the Kingdom. Despite the unsavory practices some of our universities have engaged in to gain prominent positions on international university ranking lists, our higher education institutions are changing for the better, a trend that will continue because the process of change and development takes a long time. However, even if they do progress, there are new, highly specialized fields that emerge every day; science and knowledge are advancing at a great speed and we cannot catch up unless we go directly to the source. Only the other day, I learned about a disease for which we have no cure in the Kingdom, but for which Swedish researchers have found a cure using a new technique. Furthermore, many Asian countries, particularly Japan and South Korea, are more advanced and their universities are far superior to ours. Yet despite their progress, Japanese and South Korean students in the US outnumber Saudi students. Even advanced European countries like France send many of their postgraduate students to the US and there is a considerable exchange of professors between Europe and the US. Therefore, I think it will be a mistake to stop sending our students abroad. The Kingdom needs its foreign-educated graduates and we should continue the practice of giving our youth the best education possible. __
