Schools, Students Flock to Dubai
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118064920887620582.html
LONDON -- European business schools are staking out
a profitable new frontier.
A growing number of institutions are flying lecturers East
and setting up their whiteboards in the Persian Gulf,
particularly booming Dubai in the United Arab Emirates,
where they are offering M.B.A.s and executive courses to
the region's many Middle Eastern and expatriate businesspeople.
London Business School and Cass Business School are among
the latest to announce programs in Dubai. They join Insead,
Manchester Business School and Maastricht School of Management,
among others in the region eager to provide conveniently located,
international-quality education to a population whose
attendance at American schools dropped after the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"Big management challenges [occur] where there's a great
explosion of growth...and therefore it's a good place for
a top business school to be engaged," said Nigel Banister,
chief of the Manchester school's international programs.
And for M.B.A.-seekers from Middle Eastern backgrounds,
the U.S., once a favored destination, has become less appealing
in recent years, he and others said.
Aamir al-Ghamdi, a Saudi advertising account director
studying in Manchester's Dubai program, says most of the
executives he knows "would have loved to go to the U.S.
But with all the complications and the visa restrictions,"
they have been drawn instead to Europe or to Western schools
offering study in the Gulf.
"A lot of universities are now jumping on the bandwagon
and saying, 'If you don't want to go to the U.S.,
come to our university, we're cheaper [and] we're better,' "
Mr. Ghamdi said.
The number of Middle Easterners studying in the U.S. fell
sharply after 2001, figures from the U.S. State Department
and the New York-based Institute of International Education show.
The State Department doesn't publicly release visa-refusal rates,
so it is difficult to know whether the students are staying away
because they believe visas are hard to get, or because they have
sought them and been turned down.
Mr. Ghamdi chose Manchester because he studied previously in Britain
and was familiar with its educational system. He believes it is
"definitely" harder to get a U.S. visa now than before 2001 and
said a friend who studied in Virginia was uncomfortable there
because he felt fellow students feared him.
Dubai's appeal as an educational base springs from some
of the factors that have made it a fast-growing financial center.
It is a conduit for some of the enormous sums of money
that high oil prices have brought into the region and
is one of the Gulf's most cosmopolitan cities.
Like others in the region, the rulers of Dubai and the U.A.E.
have sought to promote education, supporting the tax-free Dubai
Knowledge Village campus, where many foreign universities have
set up shop.
India is particularly tantalizing. "There is an enormous demand
for world-class business-school education" among the country's executives,
and like other institutions, London Business School
hopes to draw many of them to Dubai, Mr. Degraeve said.
The new Gulf-based programs said the quality of courses on
offer would be the same as is offered on their home campuses,
with faculty flying out to teach and degrees equivalent to
those offered in Europe.
Scotland's University of Strathclyde Business School was
early to get into the Gulf market, starting a part-time
M.B.A. program in Dubai in 1995 and in Abu Dhabi three
years ago. Northern England's Hull University Business School
offers similar programs in Oman and Bahrain, and the
Maastricht School of Management opened its Kuwait City campus
in 2003 and an Amman, Jordan, base shortly before that.
.
|
