King Abdul Aziz University is located in Jeddah and definitely not on some other planet in the cosmos. Half way through enrollment this year, course administrators at the university refused to admit students, both male and female, saying that they had no space left and that admissions had only been given to students who had achieved a 91 percent GPA (general point average) and above. In fact students with GPAs less than 91 percent are not even considered for enrollment at the university. There is a rumor flying around that King Saud University in Riyadh has adopted a similar stringent admission policy with regard to female students. While girls are being turned away male students are shown leniency and are granted university places.
Isn’t this an example of clear-cut sexism? Is it logical that a student with 91 percent GPA cannot find a place in one of the leading universities of Saudi Arabia? I strongly feel that this issue has definitely got out of hand and crossed all boundaries of sense. The Ministry of Higher Education needs to seriously interfere and make things fair.
Universities need to expand and establish a wide variety of courses to serve and meet the demands of the job market. Students of both genders, especially those with high GPAs, must be equally given the chance to gain university degrees. As for those with GPAs less than 80 percent, they should be made to sit placement tests designed according to individual courses and then according to their performance be granted admission.
I strongly believe that granting students admission to universities according to their GPAs is a frustrating process that wastes the hard 12 years that students put into school. As I have mentioned on previous occasions, our education system doesn’t evaluate students according to their skills and talents but rather according to their ability to memorize and dictate. These methods are really not suitable in filtering out the best of our young generation.
It is a real disaster that universities have closed their doors to students with GPAs less than 91 percent in the largest and most important of the Kingdom’s cities with the highest populations. The question remains: Where will these students go? To coffee shops or football stadiums? Or should they just access the Internet and waste their lives chit-chatting?
I’m not going to ask the admission and registration departments at Saudi universities to limit the number of non-Saudis they employ. But I will ask the Ministry of Higher Education what they have done to bring an end to the crisis that university enrollment offices are facing. On the other hand, it seems to me that we’re not really working hard to make all our high school graduates work as security guards or cashiers. I’m not saying that these jobs are not honorable but nevertheless, Saudis take up most of these jobs.
We need people that are specialized in pharmacology, medicine, engineering, information technology and many other areas. The Ministry of Higher Education needs to understand that the welfare of the Kingdom and its youth is its responsibility. Problems with admission have existed for a while and on many occasions in the past six years “so-called” solutions have been implemented but unfortunately these solutions are still not enough. Do we want to reach a point in the future when we will be questioning ourselves why so many of our youths are wasting their time indulging in reprehensible activities?
