For many months, we have all been following the cries of the Saudi students studying abroad on their own private expense. They have been fervently asking to join the government's scholarship program. You open your e-mail and you will find the students filling it with their requests. You will see the same thing when you open your microwave, fridge, the window or the car door. You will see them crying everywhere to be given a chance to join the program. They are repeating their legitimate requests time and again on every forum. When a royal order was recently issued to include them in the program, we became happy for them. We believed that the predicament of more than 12,000 male and female students and their families would finally be over. This was, however, a short-lived happiness. We have a common saying to express our immediately crushed joy. Our folk usually say: "There is a provider in heavens but there are a lot of envious people against God's providence on earth." The Ministry of Education put these students on its mind and started creating complications for them. It did start to implement the royal order but on a very limited scale. The ministry included very few students in the scholarship program. Their number does not constitute any remarkable figure compared to the large number of students waiting to be added to the program. The students immediately began their electronic campaign against the ministry. They used every possible forum including Twitter, Facebook, print media, satellite channels, the streets, the skies and the seas. They wrote hashtags, SMS messages, letters and appeals to support their legal demands. They simply left no stone unturned to make their voices reach the officials. Personally, I do not blame these students for their electronic fever. They must have obtained heavy loans to be able to travel abroad to join respectable universities. These students did not go to these far away countries for tourism. They went there to get a good education and to come back to serve their country, similar to the students who have studied under the government's scholarship program. The students are quite willing to abide by all the ministry's rules and regulations concerning their inclusion in the program. All the blame for their misery goes to the ministry that is putting more new hurdles just to rid itself of this problem in which it has been a major partner. When these students took bank loans to travel, they were banking on the system of the Ministry of Higher Education (before it was merged with the Ministry of Education). That system would enable the students studying at their own private expenses abroad to join the scholarship program without any difficulty. The only condition was that the university should be a recognized one, the student's specialization was acceptable to the ministry and their grades were good. All of a sudden the Education Ministry closed all the doors in their faces as if they were students from the Congo or Ecuador, not Saudi citizens like their compatriots who were studying at the government's expense. I do not think that the private students are living in the countries where they went for education. Rather they were residing in Twitter and other social media tools to make their request reach the concerned officials. They are appealing, bleeding and crying to defend their legal demands and to have their voices heard. There is no use for them to continue doing this because the ministry is not willing to listen to them. It has no plans to contain or solve their problem. It is unable to come with a solution that will satisfy it and the students at the same time. All that the ministry has done was to add few students to the scholarship program and sit there enjoying the suffering of students who have not been able to join the program. By doing so, it is as if the ministry is saying that it is not responsible for their problem. This is, no doubt, the wrong attitude. The ministry was not the main cause of the problem but this does not absolve it from the responsibility of trying to find a solution.
