It has been more than 10 years since the beginning of King Abdullah Scholarship Program (KASP). The initiative heralded the dawn of a new era. This move was totally in sync with the needs of the 21st century.
A huge number of Saudis has benefitted from this program. In order to take full advantage of this program, we should analyze the outcome of this program on a scientific basis. We should try to assess its outcome so as to make it more and more effective.
The main focus of this assessment should be: How did the students fare in their studies abroad? What is their performance in their respective professions? How many of them are working abroad? How to further streamline the program and tailor it to suit the ever-changing needs of the global and local markets?
I am sure these issues must be under consideration at the official level. Interestingly, when it comes to the public level we tend to become too sentimental about this program. We usually discuss this program from a very different perspective — our heroic youth living all by themselves in a foreign land and trying to adapt to a new culture far away from their homes and the difficulties they face coping with day-to-day problems like preparing food and taking proper rest etc.
In our emotional state of mind we often forget that it is one of the major objectives of this program.
I have personally witnessed and heard a lot of stories about students who returned home after finishing their studies abroad but they appear no different to their peers who had acquired same degrees from institutions within the Kingdom. Of course, this is not the fault of the scholarship program. We have developed the habit of taking for granted the facilities our government offers us for our welfare and in the greater interest of the country.
I personally know various scholarship students who have miserably failed in taking full advantage of the opportunity provided to them by our government. Many, of course not all, of them cannot write a single e-mail without grammatical errors. Many of them lack the basic soft skills to run a meeting, or to stand up in front of a group of staff to give a presentation.
Getting the opportunity to finish one’s education from the best schools in the West is a privilege and many of us don’t take full advantage of this opportunity. They go abroad and return with the same attitudes and preconceived notions about themselves and the world. Their time there is divided between going to school and hanging out with their local friends. They hardly speak the language of their respective host countries, they hardly try to study anything about their history, their cultures and they rarely form any sustainable friendships with anyone from that country.
I happen to be following a media personnel on Snapchat who decided to give his account to a number of scholarship students from around the globe to give a glimpse of their lives abroad during Ramadan. Surprisingly, the stories these students shared are almost identical. From the United States to Canada and from France to Japan, the stories of our students were all about missing the local cuisines during suhoor and iftar. I wished to see someone sitting with a local from those countries explaining to him or her about the Saudi traditions during Ramadan or to sit with a Muslim from these countries and see how they spend their time in Ramadan.
The picture is not all that gloomy though, there are those who go there and take full advantage of the opportunity to its fullest, excelling in their studies, producing researches and patents. Although their accomplishments do deserve to be celebrated, exaggerating these accomplishments as we usually do in the local media do them no good. They are still taking their first steps in the world of professionalism and academia, and the real challenge would be seeing what they are going to do when they return home; would they keep the same momentum of production or they would submit to the norms and consider the scholarship experience a time that had already passed.
At the end, this is an article for scholarship and not against it, I am all for it, and I wish my kids would also get the chance one day to go through this experience. We need to evaluate the outcome of this program and enhance it to meet the needs of today’s labor market. Sending students out there and following their academic records is not enough, we need to be selective in what fields they choose and we need to produce other criteria to measure the success of the program that go hand in hand with the academic records.
