Arab region universities are competing to attract students and faculty from around the region and the world.
High youth unemployment and other factors have led to changes in higher education in the region.
The Arab world is engaged in a higher education arms race as it struggles to train unprecedented numbers of young adults for the jobs of tomorrow.
With government jobs dwindling and oil reserves drying up, countries across the region are increasingly turning to private universities to give students the skills that employers require in today’s high-tech economy. At the same time, political leaders are investing heavily to reposition their countries as leaders in producing new discoveries and research.
"Most universities that are opening in the region – good and not-so-good – tend to be professional schools," says Ahmad Dallal, provost at the American University of Beirut, a leading research university in the Arab world. "But the region needs a critical mass of research institutions and needs to contribute to knowledge production, not just the transmission of knowledge."
[Check out how schools fared in the 2015 Best Arab Region Universities rankings.]
As a result, the region, led by the Gulf states, has seen the number of universities explode in recent years to more than 800 today, according to the comprehensive directory produced by U.S. News last year. The trend offers today's prospective students more choices than ever before – but with no easy way to shop around for the best option, as participation in accreditation bodies and worldwide rankingslags behind.
"There are universities in Lebanon – and across the region – that are offering Ph.D.s that have no business in some cases even offering a bachelor's degree," says Dallal.
The focus on job skills is to be expected in a region with the world's worst youth unemployment, at about 23 percent. The World Bank estimates that Arab nations need to create 3 million more jobs every year than they currently do if they hope to turn their economies around.
"Undergraduate programs in the Arab countries are more than ever geared toward serving the ever-growing needs of their communities," says Cesar Wazen, an expert in higher education with experience in Qatar and Lebanon. "They are tasked with creating cadres who will handle the running of the country" and, in some countries, "the rebuilding of infrastructure due to massive destructions incurred lately."
Wazen argues that countries across the region have "growing, developing populations in need of skilled personnel rather than research-oriented graduates." He raises concerns about ranking universities solely by their research output, even as Qatar University, for example, lists becoming "a leader in research in the region" as one of its main goals.
Some recently established universities were created with research as a top priority.
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, which offers master’s and doctoral degrees, likens itself to an Arab MIT or a modern-day House of Knowledge, after the 8th century Abbasid university in Baghdad.
"It is my desire that this new university become one of the world's great institutions of research," King Abdullah said in a speech heralding the university, which opened its doors in 2009.
As part of that trend, Arab universities are competing to attract students and faculty from across the region and around the world as they seek to expose their students to diverse cultures and viewpoints while raising their international profile. The push has led to a surge in the use of online tools to supplement – and, in some cases, replace – traditional classroom instruction, while establishing English as the lingua franca of education in the region, notably at KAUST and other recently established institutions.
The changes are welcome news to international experts critical of the region's track record of creating unemployable graduates suited mostly for government jobs that no longer exist.
"Fortunately, in recent years there has been an interesting diversification in the Arab world, which is allowing students to have in front of them more options than what they used to have in the past," says Francisco Marmolejo, higher education coordinator at the World Bank. "And of course this is due to the fact that there has been tremendous (demographic) pressure."
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