Higher Education in the Gulf by Segumpan Reynaldo Gacho;McAlaney John; & John McAlaney

Author:Segumpan, Reynaldo Gacho;McAlaney, John; & John McAlaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

Part II

Non-regional drivers of quality education

7 How did the largest overseas scholarship programme in history narrow the gender capabilities gap in Saudi Arabia?

Abdul Ghaffar Mughal

Introduction and background

Education has been a high priority for successive monarchs in the nation-building project since the founding of the modern state of Saudi Arabia in 1932 by King Abdul Aziz. Armed with enormous oil wealth since the oil boom of the 70s, Saudi monarchs have often been ahead of the society in the pursuit of socioeconomic modernisation, with education being central to the nation-building agenda.

Faced with finite energy resources and increasingly uncertain future demand for fossil fuel, the logic of diversifying into a high-value knowledge-based economy appears to be inexorable to most oil-rich Gulf States, with the education of the population acquiring added significance. Thus, between 1998 and 2008, Saudi government spent approximately one-fifth to one-fourth of its total government budget on education, significantly higher than both the world average and the average for the upper-middle-income countries.1

Tertiary education has received a disproportionate share of state resources allocated to education by Saudi Arabia. With the assumption of power in 2005 by King Abdullah, higher education received an even more potent shot in the arm. Not only did the King establish the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in 2009 with an astronomical endowment of SAR 10bn, he also launched the largest ever state-funded overseas scholarship scheme in the world – the King Abdullah Scholarship Programme (henceforth, KASP) in 2005. Since then, outbound student mobility from Saudi Arabia took a quantum jump, as shown in Figure 7.1.

Figure 7.1 Total outbound internationally mobile tertiary students from Saudi Arabia.

Source: Data from the database: World Development Indicators 2018.

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