Build It And They Will Learn

Other initiatives are also helping. The heavy investments many of these states have made in airlines and hotels have made them unusually accessible. Visa restrictions (for everyone but Israelis) are among the most liberal in the world, and places like Dubai even offer "smart cards" to regular visitors, allowing them to pass effortlessly through "eGates" without showing a passport. This ease of travel has made conferences like last year's Festival of Thinkers in Abu Dhabi—which brought together 16 Nobel Prize winners and more than 160 intellectuals from around the world—an almost daily affair in the gulf. Last year 140 conferences took place in Qatar alone.

The ethnic and national diversity now found in the gulf has also helped attract American universities. "You can find people from South Asia, the Far East, Africa, Europe and the whole Middle East [there]," says Hilary Ballon, a former Columbia art history professor recently appointed an associate vice chancellor of New York University's Abu Dhabi campus. "That kind of cosmopolitan intersection is what drew NYU to the gulf, and it will be a great stimulus to intellectual growth."

The gulf model has drawbacks, of course, and there's no guarantee that what works in America will work there. A good school does not just "borrow a curriculum or a few teachers from another prestigious university," says Mourad Ezzine, a Middle East specialist for the World Bank who oversaw its recent report on Arab education. With a limited pool of high-caliber students, he warns, the region may run into difficulty. Mary Ann Tetreault, who taught at many of the gulf's new schools on a Fulbright scholarship, says she could offer only "light versions" of her international-affairs courses, and warns that U.S. schools are "putting in programs that [local] kids can't succeed at" due to "basic skill issues," including limited math and science training and poor study habits.

None of those issues is unique to the gulf, however, or is likely to slow its push into higher education.

And there are signs that the boom will benefit everyone. "There are more people around the world in universities today than probably went to university in all of human history combined," says Allan Goodman, president of the New York-based Institute of International Education. "These new places will be competing with America for the best and the brightest, but there are a lot more best and brightest out there." In other words, competition may be growing—but the world is growing even faster.

© 2008