Saudi Arabien: Riad nutzt Ölboom zur Umgestaltung des Bildungssystems

"Es gibt keine Verbindung zwischen Ausbildung und den Anforderungen des Arbeitsmarktes," beschreibt Saeed Al Malowi, Dozent an der saudischen Taibah University, die aktuelle Situation.


Riyadh to use oil boom to revamp education system
Bahrain Tribune - 05 September, 2008

When Saeed Al Malowi talks with his mechanical engineering students at Taibah University in Saudi Arabia, he says the conversation often turns to pursuing advanced degrees abroad and the dim prospects of finding jobs at home.

“There is no relationship between education and the demands in the workforce,” the 27-year-old teaching assistant said in Medina.

To improve training, Saudi Arabia is spending some of the $ 1 billion a day it receives from oil exports to transform higher education. As a first step, the kingdom is building a graduate-level science and technology school that has used its $ 10 billion endowment to form partnerships with the University of Cambridge, Stanford University and General Electric Co.

The institution will be independent of the scholars who have dominated Saudi education since 1979, broadening options in a country where high school courses focus on religion more than any other subject. That may help graduates find jobs and blunt the threat that long-term unemployment will push young people into terrorist groups, said Anoushka Marashlian, an independent Middle East analyst based in London. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, is scheduled to open in September 2009. Oil Minister Ali Al Naimi is overseeing the project and the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority, headed by Governor Amr Al Dabbagh, is promoting private investment in the country’s education system.

“The vision of the king is to devote this boom toward human capital,” Al Dabbagh said. “To become really a producer of knowledge as opposed to a consumer.” Young people aged 20 to 24 make up 44 per cent of jobless citizens in Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter. The country’s schools have been criticised for breeding people with few work skills.

Pumping money into universities may not be enough to loosen the clergy’s grip on young people. Youths under 14, who make up 38 per cent of the Saudi population, won’t benefit from experiments in post-graduate education, said Farid Abolfathi, managing director of country risk and macroeconomics at New York-based Global Insight, which provides political analysis for governments and companies.

The state is “more likely to throw money at problems than to make fundamental changes,” he said. Kaust is being built in the Red Sea fishing village of Thuwal, 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Jeddah.

Today, a forest of steel construction cranes rises out of the desert sands. The institution will have tree-lined streets, a canal and a marina, according to the university’s Web site. Saudi Arabia isn’t alone in trying to attract international academic leaders to the Persian Gulf to improve education and diversify the economy. New York University is planning a campus in Abu Dhabi, and Cornell University will set up a medical school campus in Doha, Qatar.

In Saudi Arabia, Kaust is part of an effort to change the education system, Al Dabbagh said in an interview in Medina.