KAUST is the vanguard of a major push by Saudi Arabia’s monarch to use its oil wealth to diversify the economy beyond petroleum and prepare the country for a globalised competitive environment. HRH King Abdallah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is pushing to create what he calls a "knowledge-based society" as for too long the country has not invested well enough in the education of its people, and nowhere is this more evident than in the statistics showing how many young adults elect to seek education abroad. The King explained his approach during the inauguration ceremony, “The Islamic nation knows too well that it will not be powerful unless it depends on, after God, science.”
The university, spread over a large campus of about 365-square-kilometres, is located in Thuwal, a Red Sea fishing village about 80-kilometres north of Jeddah. Make your way through the manicured gardens and venture into the sleek glass-and-stone buildings and you’ll discover science and mathematics labs equipped with the latest technology including one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, dubbed Shaheen, and a six-dimensional virtual reality facility called Cornea, that can be used for space and geological research. The university's President, Choon Fong Shih, claims that KAUST is "Stanford on the Red Sea."
Shih, a former president of the National University of Singapore and a long-time mechanical engineering professor at Brown University, is just one of many big name personalities that KAUST has managed to attract. The board of trustees includes Vanguard's ceo John Brennan, Princeton's president Shirley Tilghman and former Cornell president Frank Rhodes. Furthermore, many members of the faculty are prominent academics who have been hired from top universities in the US and Europe. Already a number of large, multinational corporations including Boeing, Dow Chemical, General Electric and Schlumberger have signed research partnerships with the university. And as if that wasn’t impressive enough there’s the matter of KAUST’s endowment, which amounts to 10 billion USD thanks to a single donation from King Abdullah - that places it in Harvard and Yale territory.
That’s not all however. KAUST is run like a Western-style university, albeit a university geared for students in the sciences working for a masters or doctoral degree. Extraordinarily, it's co-ed - that makes it the only school in the entire Kingdom that has students of both sexes. Additionally, the women who attend are not required to wear veils or abayas within the confines of the campus walls. All of the courses are taught in English and tuition is free.
When you put all of that together with the fact that in September 2010, the Saudi Council of Ministers, the body responsible for setting national policies, unveiled a five year development plan earmarking 200 billion USD to expand access to schools and higher education, it seems that KAUST almost certainly will achieve everything King Abdallah wished of it when he said, “KAUST will become a house of wisdom and a beacon of tolerance.”
WHAT King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
WHERE Thuwal, near Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia
WHEN KAUST opened its doors in September, 2009
WHY Meeting the highest standards of international education, offering its services free to students the world over and with a dedication to equality, KAUST is something truly extraordinary
www.kaust.edu.sa
