The ministry announced that 9,958 male and female students have been chosen to pursue their studies abroad. Of them 1,984 high school students have been selected to study for bachelor’s degrees, while 6,736 students were chosen for the master’s degree program followed by 1,283 students who will work toward obtaining doctorate degrees.

“The chosen students were the ones who met the criteria and accurately followed the guidelines set forth by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah,” said Khalid Al-Anqari, minister of higher education.

He explained that the scholarship program is in place to allow the education process to become accessible to all Saudi students. He said the applications have been approved taking into consideration every student’s preferred country of choice. Among the nations chosen were the US, Canada, Germany, France, Holland, Spain, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Austria.

The chosen applicants were selected from 20 specialties of study proven to be important majors in expanding the private and governmental sectors of the Kingdom’s job market.

Al-Anqari advised Saudi students to take advantage of the academic opportunities offered to them by the Kingdom while asking Saudi students upon traveling abroad to regard themselves as good ambassadors in helping the job market and the local economy to grow.

Since the program began in 2006, the King Abdullah Foreign Scholarship Program has sent over 90,000 students to pursue their education abroad.

In that time, Saudi Arabia has also pursued an aggressive development plan to build universities, schools and increased vocational training, hoping to increase the number of university students studying in the Kingdom from 860,000 to 1.7 million by 2014.