In Qatar, a big idea on campus

Instead of bringing over whole foreign universities, the Gulf state is cherry-picking single departments.

The attempt by Gulf states to establish centres of educational achievement that can match the great universities of the world is one of the trickier hurdles in their headlong rush into the modern era. While the great seats of learning such as Oxford, Harvard and the Sorbonne evolved over many generations, Gulf campuses are expected to develop blueprints that will take them from a virtual standing start to a level of sustainability and academic excellence in a relatively short time.

The UAE now has close to 60 universities, including many branch campuses of foreign institutions, and more will open as the country seeks to develop an economy based on knowledge rather than hydrocarbons. But while other Gulf states are following a similar path, there is little agreement on the best model for universities to adopt. In Dubai and Ras al Khaimah, foreign campuses are mostly self-funding and rely on revenue from tuition fees.

By contrast, Abu Dhabi's imported universities, such as the Paris-Sorbonne and the forthcoming New York University campus, are funded by the emirate. Like the UAE capital, Qatar is covering the costs of its branch campuses. But it has embarked on a new path that could provide important lessons for the UAE. Instead of paying foreign universities to create mini-versions of their home campuses with a full repertoire of courses, the Qatar Foundation, a government-funded body, has cherry-picked, inviting single departments specialising in one or two programmes to set up shop.

In Qatar's Education City, which lies just outside Doha, the buildings are unashamedly bold in their design. Here, six leading American universities offer courses in everything from medicine to art and design. Entrance requirements are high and, for now at least, it has none of the buzz of a university campus as there are only about 1,500 students - about the same as at some individual self-funding branch campuses in the UAE.

But with everything paid for by the government-funded Qatar Foundation, and with cranes and cement mixers busy creating new campuses, enrolment is set to more than double. Institutions here believe subsidies are essential if the quality of the home campus is to be replicated. Dr Mark Weichold, the dean and chief executive of Texas A&M University Qatar, which runs engineering programmes, says without subsidies the quality "would be nowhere near what we're able to offer".

"You wouldn't be able to provide the calibre of faculty or the teaching laboratory experience. You would be teaching engineering courses, but it wouldn't be the same." According to Dr James Reardon-Anderson, the dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar, "you cannot operate on just tuition fees". "You could not possibly sustain the quality," he says. "To the same degree, to the same quality, it's unimaginable.

"If you greatly increased your tuition structure, you could at some point afford to support the programme elements, but you're choosing a student body by wealth rather than talent." At Education City, institutions insist they have maintained the standards of their home campuses. According to Dr John Margolis, the dean and chief executive of Northwestern University in Qatar, fellow deans report students in Qatar "are doing as well as or better than" their US-based classmates.

"We're absolutely committed to ensuring the students who receive our degrees in Qatar will have met the very same expectations as students in the US." Similarly, Dr Margolis says the academic staff are as good as those back home, as they come from the parent university or have graduates of it. The university encourages them to maintain research or creative output and not just teach. Thamer al Kuwari, studying electrical engineering at Texas A&M University at Qatar, believes Education City offers better teaching than in the US, where the 21-year-old Qatari previously studied. Instead of lectures with hundreds of students, in Qatar there may be seminars with just a dozen.

"Here there's more concentration on you and you get to know people," he says. "It's a better atmosphere for education. In the US there are 5,000 to 10,000 students." But do employers think a student who graduates from, say, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Qatar is equal to one from the home campus? "Perceptions are a tricky thing because we know we're offering the same thing," says Allyson Vanstone, VCU Qatar's dean.

Regardless of academic standards, few say the wider university experience compares to that in the West. "The American college experience is taking an individual out of his family and school and dropping him into a sea of strangers," says Dr Reardon-Anderson. "The student grows up intellectually, morally. They reinvent themselves." He says with its modest student body made up largely of Qataris and Qatar residents, Education City does not offer this opportunity.

Jad Halabi, a 21-year-old from Lebanon who is studying mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University at Qatar, says "there's no social life on campus". "The people are mostly laid back. They finish and they go back." For some, familiarity is the attraction. Salem al Marri, 19, a Qatari studying petroleum engineering at Texas A&M, feels he is in Qatar while gaining an American education. "I wanted to stay with my family," he says. "I feel more secure here."

Dr Reardon-Anderson says Qatar's approach of cherry-picking single university departments allows it to maintain consistent standards, while if whole institutionswere replicated, quality between departments might vary. He says it also puts less strain on the parent institution. "At Georgetown, the main campus with its faculty can support one programme in Qatar. It couldn't possibly support a duplication of the whole assets.

"You would end up with a faculty that's not 60 per cent Georgetown, but five per cent. When you do that it's hard to maintain the character and quality." He says New York University faces "a challenge sustaining an operation of this scale", referring to its plan for a university of several thousand. "But they're bigger than Georgetown. I'm not here to say they can't do it." A potential drawback to Qatar's approach is that having departments from different universities may reduce academic collaboration across the campus. Education City has tried to overcome this by allowing students to take courses at more than one mini-university, creating a "multiversity".

Another concern is whether Qatar's public school system is preparing Qataris adequately to take advantage of what is on offer. Dr Steven Wright, an assistant professor in Gulf politics at Qatar University, says the value of Education City to the country will be fully realised only in the medium term, once public school reforms take hold. In any case, the modest size of Qatar's student pool and high entry standards will, admits Robert Baxter, Qatar Foundation spokesman, impose an upper-size limit on the project.

"We think we can grow to a community of a few thousand," he says. "It's comparable to a small liberal arts college." Dr Reardon-Anderson says the small size of each branch and their limited enrolment is the "single biggest challenge". Each campus has only a few hundred students, with the arts and humanities colleges tending to be smaller. "Operating at this small a scale is very challenging because everything is limited by it: the range of courses; the student activities; getting a critical mass of students interested in a topic."

There could be more quality students for the universities to draw from in the future if reforms to Qatar's public school system, currently under way, bear fruit. Dr Reardon-Anderson believes the solution is to bring in high-achieving students from other countries in the region to create a "much larger" student body, allowing top Middle East universities to compete for students regionally rather than nationally.

"Creating multiple centres of academic excellence in the Gulf is a way of creating competition that should raise the standards," he says. Mr Baxter insists Education City would welcome a "more open" set-up in which students are freer to travel, adding it already recruits from outside Qatar, including in the UAE. But Dr Reardon-Anderson believes greater international educational mobility can only be achieved if young people become more willing to travel and governments give more scholarships for them to do so.

"If you're an Emirati, you could go wherever you think the best education is, whether in Kuwait or Doha or Saudi," he says. "The whole population of the GCC is less than some European countries. If you don't have at least that pool of students to draw from on an equal footing, it's hard to see how any of these schools can reach its full potential." [e-mail]