RIYADH, 13 October 2003 — The Ministry of Higher Education has produced a list of foreign universities it says provide poor-quality education, according to Dr. Abdullah Al-Moajil, undersecretary at the Higher Education Ministry.
The universities were blacklisted by the ministry on the basis of a number of criteria including poor quality of education. It was not immediately clear which universities have been blacklisted.
In a statement carried by an Arabic daily, Dr. Al-Moajil also said that a panel has been set up to accredit universities, and it had already identified some universities in the US, Arab countries, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Currently, some 15,500 Saudi students are enrolled at universities around the world including the United States. A total of 6,744 students are pursuing their studies on Saudi government scholarships mainly in the US, Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Japan, China, Russia, Canada, Australia, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain and the UAE.
The panel will release reports of its periodic evaluation of universities.
An increasingly large number of students from Saudi Arabia are seeking admission at Western, Far Eastern and Arab universities after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, which led to the mass exodus of Saudi students from the US. More than 1,700 Saudi students cut short their university studies in the US and returned home.
According to a report released by the Saudi Embassy in Washington recently, some 6,000 Saudi students — 3,500 of them on government scholarships — had been studying at US universities before Sept. 11. Most of them faced visa and immigration problems and some reported harassment from US immigration officials and law-enforcement agencies.
