Saudis return in record numbers to US universities [11,000, double September, 2001]

Saudis return in record numbers to US universities Saudi Gazette - 14 November, 2006 www.gulfinthemedia.com/index.php?id=260863&news_type=Top⟨=en&PHPSESSID=f966bef97d61419819d0d1071fb42963 Saudi students studying in the US have achieved a record figure as their number has reached 11,000 after several years that witnessed a drop in their numbers following the September 11 attacks, Asharq Al-Awsat, the London-based Arabic-language daily reported Sunday.

The increase came as a result of the measures taken by the Saudi and American authorities, including the Saudi government's huge scholarship program to enable Saudi students to study abroad.

The program began last year, along with easing in the issue of student visas from the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia.

The education initiative also includes another scholarship program to enable American students to study in Saudi Arabia.

"The relations at the government level are strong but at the people's level there is a lot of mistrust and hatred. This scholarship program is a good step towards eradicating some of the mistrust and hatred," Gregory Gus III, a professor at Vermont University and a specialist on Saudi affairs was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

Mazyad Ibrahim Al-Mazyad, the Saudi Cultural Attaché said 10,936 Saudi students have been registered in 733 education institutions throughout the United States. He said 3,000 other Saudi students are expected to arrive in the new semester. This means their number will reach 14,000 students. Virginia occupies the fourth position after California, Florida and Colorado as a favored destination for Saudi students seeking study at US universities. There are 736 Saudi students at universities in the state of Virginia.

The number of Saudi students now exceeds the number of students in the academic year 1980/1981, as their number then reached 10,440 according to the International Education Institution in New York, a non-profit organization working with the US State Department. Also, the current figure is double the number of Saudi students in the US in September 2001 when then stood at 5,579.

Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the Kingdom's ambassador to the US, said joint education efforts began to increase following the April 2005 meeting between King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, who was Crown Prince then, and US President George Bush in Crawford, Texas.

However, according to an official at the US State Department, Saudi students started arriving in large numbers to study in the US in the late 1970's. After 1981, their numbers started to dwindle down as more students were admitted at the Saudi universities and the Saudi government began to focus less on getting international experience.

In 2001, bilateral relations were negatively affected to the terrorist attacks in 2001. For several months after the attacks, no Saudi national was granted a student visa.

Mazyad said in the following year a limited number got visas. According to the International Education Institute, the number of Saudi students dropped by 25.2 percent in the academic year 2002/2003.

With the advent of the academic year 2004/2005, the number of Saudi students reached 3,035. This low figure was never reached since the seventies.

According to the State Department, 9,471 Saudi nationals received student visas in the academic year ending Sept. 30. This is a 297 percent increase compared to the number of visas issued in the previous year reaching 2,383.

The ironies!

Americans adventuresome in study abroad

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1738061/posts

American college students are becoming more adventuresome as they study abroad, showing less interest in English-speaking destinations such as Great Britain and Australia and more in such alternatives as China, India, Argentina and Brazil.

Britain remained the most popular study destination last year, according to annual figures due for release Monday by the Institute of International Education, followed by Italy, Spain and France.

But the number of U.S. students studying in Britain and Australia declined slightly, even as the number of American students abroad rose 8 percent overall to 205,983 in 2005. The growth came in non-English speaking European countries and in Asia, which still attracts lower numbers overall but is growing rapidly.

China is now the eighth most popular destination for American students, attracting nearly 6,400 last year, up 35 percent from the year before. Though still comparably small at around 2,000 students per year, Argentina and India saw increases of more than 50 percent.

"I'm sure my friends and family would say 'Why did you pick Africa, a poor country, why don't you go to Europe or somewhere more glamorous?'" said Xinh Pham, a Michigan State student who took part in a university-sponsored program to study nutrition in Tanzania last summer.

The trip was "a great way to dip my feet into Africa," and "it totally changed my views of the world," she said.

Allan Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, said a range of factors contributed to the trend, from growing awareness of globalization after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to programs such as President Bush's National Security Language Initiative, which trains soldiers, intelligence officers and diplomats in foreign languages.

"What Americans are doing is waking up and discovering there's a world out there," he said.

Still, it is not clear that most students are getting genuine immersion experiences. More than half (56 percent) who study abroad do so only for summer terms or other programs lasting less than one semester. Pham's program lasted just a few weeks. Only 6 percent study abroad a full year.

"Time matters, but any experience is better than no experience in a country where 80 percent of our citizens don't have a passport," Goodman said.

Other figures to be released Monday tracked the flow of students in the opposite direction _ from foreign countries into U.S. universities.

The institute found that international enrollment in U.S. higher education remained steady last year at about 565,000, after two straight years of declines, but that new enrollments were up about 8 percent from 2004-05. That suggests that the slowdown that occurred after the Sept. 11 attacks may have ended and that the overall figure will begin to grow again.

Full data for this fall isn't yet available, but a separate survey by a consortium of higher education groups finds 45 percent of institutions reporting increases in international enrollment and only 26 percent recording declines. The rest stayed about steady.

The figures are of keen interest to universities, which depend on foreign students for teaching and research help, and to policymakers, who consider it essential that future foreign leaders be familiar with the United States.

Both groups had been alarmed by slackening interest among international students in studying in the United States _ a trend blamed on anti-Americanism, difficulties getting visas after the attacks and growing competition from universities abroad.

International students provide an estimated $13.5 billion boost to the economy. The Department of Commerce calls higher education the country's fifth-largest export in the service sector.

Last year saw significant increases in students from South Korea, Taiwan and Mexico. India sends the most students (76,503), although the number declined about 5 percent last year. China is No. 2 with 62,582, about the same as a year ago.

Other countries showing large percentage increases in the number of students sent to the U.S. include Nepal and Vietnam, while Japan, Turkey and Malaysia saw declines. Overall, 58 percent of international students in the U.S. come from Asia.

On Friday, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, along with a delegation of U.S. college presidents, departed on a trip for Japan, South Korea and China to try to expand interest in American universities.

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