Academics and administrators from 24 American universities are in Iraq this week to lend support to an ambitious planned overhaul of Iraqi higher education and to stage student-recruitment fairs in Baghdad and the northern city of Sulaymaniyah.
The trip was organized by the office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who is taking the first significant steps since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, in 2003, to rebuild the nation’s university system. This week’s event is the first college recruitment fair in recent memory in which foreign representatives have participated.
Mr. Maliki has called for spending a portion of Iraq’s oil wealth to reform the nation’s education system under a proposal known as the Iraqi Education Initiative. It includes sending 10,000 students abroad each year for the next five years to earn undergraduate or graduate degrees. Most of those students would be sent to Australia, Britain, Canada, or the United States.
Iraq’s Parliament must approve the plan, but Mr. Maliki has already secured $55-million to set up the program and send 500 students abroad this fall, said Zuhair A.G. Humadi, who is overseeing the initiative. He said he is confident that parliamentary approval for the full program will come eventually.
“Almost every political group in Iraq supports this project,” he said by telephone from Baghdad. “It should be no problem.”
Iraq’s higher-education system has been near collapse in recent years. Hundreds of professors have been killed, and thousands more have fled the country. On university campuses, research barely exists, and only recently have classes begun to be held regularly. The government wants to rebuild the K-12 education system as well.
“We need to make changes to elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education through curriculum development, through introducing new methods of teaching, through introducing new majors that aren’t available in Iraq,” said Mr. Humadi.
Eager to Learn
Mr. al-Maliki’s office is counting on American academe to lend its support to the effort. This week’s visits, while focused primarily on student recruitment, were also an opportunity to explore ways in which American universities might help their Iraqi counterparts. That fact was not lost on the visitors to Baghdad.
“I know from experience how hard the American army has worked over here to try to improve the lives of Iraqis, but their days here are now drawing to a close,” said Katherine Blue Carroll, a political scientist from Vanderbilt University, in a telephone interview from Baghdad. “Someone needs to step up to the plate next, and I think American universities should lead the way.”
“The students I met feel like they’ve fallen way behind and are dying to learn and to be part of the world,” she said.
Some 250 American colleges were invited to attend the fairs. The two dozen that did accept represented a cross-section that included the University of Bridgeport. the University of Oregon, and Valparaiso University. A number of the institutions have some connection to Iraq, whether through programs they operate in the country or through Iraqi alumni. (Mr. Humadi, for example, is a graduate of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, which was in attendance.) The British Council, a quasi-governmental agency that promotes Britain abroad, represented universities from Britain.
Security in the Iraqi capital has improved significantly in recent months, although sporadic attacks still plague the city. On Tuesday, Ammar Aziz Muhammad Ali, an undersecretary in the Ministry of Higher Education, narrowly escaped a roadside bomb attack on his convoy in central Baghdad. The next day, the dean of Baghdad’s Islamic University survived a car bombing that killed four other people.
Ms. Carroll has been in Iraq for nine months, on leave from Vanderbilt and embedded with a combat unit of the U.S. Army as a member of a human-terrain team, a military effort in which social scientists help brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan make better decisions by providing them with detailed information about local customs and practices. Most of the American university representatives, however, were visiting Iraq for the first time.
They landed at Baghdad International Airport on Monday and traveled across the city, without military escorts, to the heavily guarded Green Zone, where they were put up in the Al-Rashid Hotel by Mr. al-Maliki’s office. (The university representatives paid their own air fare.)
On Tuesday they set up tables and promotional materials in the hotel, where they greeted more than 300 prospective students.
‘Really Meaningful Relationship’
“These are passionate, hungry students,” said Ian Little, director of international student recruitment at Virginia Commonwealth University. “This is going to be a really meaningful relationship for us.”
Because no scholarships have been awarded yet, most students were simply seeking information about the kinds of programs offered by American and British universities. The majority of Iraqi students, Ms. Carroll said, were interested in pursuing graduate degrees in engineering. A few were interested in English literature, and one in political science.
“English language is probably the skill that they’re missing the most,” Mr. Little said. (The Iraqi government has planned a 9-month language program to help scholarship students with poor English skills improve before they leave Baghdad.)
The program is modeled on similar schemes that have helped neighboring countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, rapidly build a highly skilled work force. They have put millions of dollars into scholarships to send students abroad.
Mr. Humadi said he expected 70 per cent of the Iraqi scholarships to be awarded to undergraduates, 20 per cent to master’s students, and 10 per cent to Ph.D. students.
Some hurdles to studying in the United States have been lowered, although others remain.
Iraqi students who have gained admission to American colleges are now able to apply for student visas at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and no longer have to make the onerous journey to embassies in Jordan or Syria. The process was so difficult that hundreds of Iraqi students never got their visas.
Iraqi students who want to take the GMAT, however, are not able to do so in Iraq. The closest cities in which the test is available are Amman, Jordan, and Sharq, Kuwait.