Accepted into Education City
American universities setting up campuses in the Middle East represent the next step in the globalization of U.S. higher education
Christina Asquith
Just minutes from the Persian Gulf’s translucent blue waters, through the flat, white desert and past the headquarters of the Al Jazeera news network, a large sign in both Arabic and English reads: “Welcome to Education City.”
Inside the 2,500-acre, well-guarded compound, students from across the Arab world are enrolled in one of five premier U.S. universities that have arrived in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar in recent years to deliver American-style education and degrees. The institutions include Carnegie Mellon University, the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Texas A&M University, Virginia Commonwealth University School for the Arts and Weill Cornell Medical Center, which offers the first and only American medical degree outside of the United States.
Qatar’s Education City, perhaps the world’s most diverse campus, is almost entirely unknown in the United States, but represents the next step in the globalization of American higher education — international franchising. Aided by technology such as online libraries, distance learning and streaming video, U.S. universities offer — and charge tuition for — a combination of live and digital education that is supposedly indistinguishable in quality from that received on the home campuses.
