Saudis Again Head to U.S. Campuses
Record Demand Ends Years-Long Decline, Notably Since 9/11
Caryle Murphy and Susan Kinzie

A record number of nearly 11,000 Saudis are pursuing higher education in the United States, reversing a years-long decline in students coming from the oil-rich kingdom, particularly after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The surge is a result of recent measures taken by the U.S. and Saudi governments, including a major Saudi government scholarship program for study abroad, launched last year, and implementation of more organized procedures for issuing student visas by the U.S. Embassy in the kingdom.

The education initiative, which also envisions a second scholarship program to enable U.S. scholars to study and teach in Saudi Arabia, arose from a mutual desire to counter growing hostility between the populations of both nations sparked by the discovery that 15 of the 19 hijackers Sept. 11, 2001, were Saudi citizens, according to officials on both sides and Middle East experts.

“At the government level, relations are strong. . . . But at the popular level, there’s a huge amount of mistrust and antipathy,” said F. Gregory Gause III, a University of Vermont professor who specializes in Saudi affairs. “This [scholarship program] is a good step towards trying to dissipate some of that mistrust and antipathy.”

It’s taken a while, but Saudi students are now enrolling in American universities at a rate not seen since the 1960s and early 70s. This Washington Post article has most of its facts exactly right–not too surprising as one of the writers, Caryle Murphy, has at least been to the KSA. The writers miss one factor in the decline in the number of Saudis studying in the US from the 1980s onward, though. They cite the growth of Saudi universities drawing off most of the students, but doesn’t note that the Saudi government’s budgets were severely crimped by oil selling at $10/barrel; the government couldn’t afford sending students abroad, though it clearly continued to value foreign degrees, shown by its own hiring preferences.

The article also notes, correctly, that the US-Saudi relationship ‘suffered from neglect’. From the end of Desert Storm in 1991, the relationship was on autopilot. While the US government had augmented its Public Diplomacy staffing during that war, it reduced its efforts to below 1990 levels, a condition that continued until I was able to increase staffing in 2002. One critique I’ll make of the Clinton Administration from my work with them is that they sure took their international friends for granted, spending little effort to maintain relationships…