The Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education for Scholarship Affairs Dr. Nasser Al-Fouzan recently stated that the scholarship program will continue and its next stage will be announced “after completion of the comprehensive evaluation of the program with the aim of improving the specializations in order to meet the requirements of the labor market and the public and private sectors.”
This statement came at the right time because so many rumors on the scholarship program were going around that many had predicted it would be stopped altogether.
Since the program will be evaluated, this article and others are a good means to participate in this evaluation. The aim is to re-present ideas which I offered for the first time over a decade ago. At the time, I myself was a scholarship student studying abroad.
The first task at hand is to specify the objective of sending students abroad on scholarships. Regrettably, the idea that is being presented on this topic focuses on obtaining a degree in fields in which there are many vacancies in the Kingdom, like the health field.
According to this narrow view, scholarship specializations are restricted to these limited fields year after year. This is not a scientific goal and many advanced nations do not send their students on scholarships abroad simply to fill vacancies. The scholarship program should instead be viewed as an objective human development program and strategy so that it is more diverse and open to different cultures, methods and experiences. The goal is to implant graduates with various international experiences that they can apply at the domestic level.
Graduates from international universities can contribute to ideological, intellectual, human and cultural renewal and development in the country by studying abroad and transferring various international expertise to the Kingdom.
Our education system is capable of producing degree holders, but it cannot claim to produce graduates who can master all modern international developments. If we insist that the goal is obtaining a degree and we consider graduates from our local institutions as sufficient, this means that we will be isolated from the world.
The issue is not merely to obtain a degree but to understand the latest advancements in numerous key fields. Proof of this can be found in the number of students studying outside their countries — from less than half a million students in 1975 to over 4 million students in 2010.
Foreign students studying in European countries have reached 874,000 while European students who joined short- or long-term study programs outside their countries and in other European Union countries reached 500,000 in 2007.
The US attracts the largest number of foreign students while the number of American students studying abroad has exceeded 50,000. Japan, Canada and France have nearly the same number of students — 50,000 each — abroad. They have plans to increase these figures. For example, Canada has announced its strategy to increase its students abroad to about 250,000.
As for Germany and South Korea, the number of students abroad from each country has exceeded 100,000. Of course, we should not forget the countries that possess the highest percentages — China and India. Perhaps the countries differ in the mechanism for financing and the type and level of their programs in this connection. But ultimately, all agree that a student studying outside his country forms an important means in human development.
When the Kingdom expanded its scholarship program it was because it realized sending students aboard was a global trend aimed at developing science and technology and human development in general. It was an acknowledgement that we should not live isolated from rest of the world and that we needed a plan to achieve modernization. The matter was not a choice more than it was a sense of responsibility and awareness of this responsibility toward our country's distinct status among countries around the world.
God willing, the Kingdom should continue to rise and develop as part of international development and not in isolation from it. The scholarship program is one of the means to achieving this and it must continue with the same force and activity. This does not mean that the program does not need some development in its administration and organization. What is important, however, is that we should differentiate between its importance as a program that must continue and the importance of development by discussing the negative aspects of implementation and tackling them accordingly. There is more on the topic.
