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[willynilly]

According to 'The National' newspaper on page 6 today (Feb 25th). George Mason University in RAK has been unable to attract enough students and tuition at the end of this semester may cease altogether. A statement is due from the authorities clarifying the situation.
Totally predictable, it would seem to me. Many observers have forecast that this institution was set up with inadequate backing on spurious predictions of student numbers. Chickens and roost come to mind!

[Sheikh N Bake]

Yes indeed. Search under Globalnomad2 posts (and later Sheikh N Bake posts too, I think) for the whole story if you haven't read it all before. REALLY badly run. I suppose the dumbest thing was, during the first year, outsourcing management to some RAK-based company of Indian bookkeepers who had literally no clue what an American university was, and didn't care either.

Then for the second year their big idea was to hire an American ogre as campus CEO whose idea of management was (a) having complete and utter contempt for the EFL rank and file; yes, I know that's common enough, and (b) to fire people while they were out sick (not me--a well-liked dean of student affairs, and others).

[LuxorHouse]

Article from today's Chronicle of Higher Education:
Friday, February 27, 2009


George Mason U. Will Close Its Campus in the Persian Gulf
By ANDREW MILLS

George Mason University has decided to shut down its branch campus in the Persian Gulf emirate of Ras al Khaymah, after its local partners drastically slashed the campus�s operating budget while expecting the university to nearly double the number of students enrolled at the campus, the university's provost said Thursday.

In recent years, a number of high-profile American colleges like New York University, Georgetown University, and Michigan State University have started operating in the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf, but George Mason�s campus is the first to fail. It has been plagued by troubles since the outset.

�Anybody in the global business of education realizes that you try some stuff and certain fraction of it doesn�t work,� said Peter N. Stearns, George Mason's provost. �The lesson from this is not don�t ever do this.�

But, he admits, opening a branch campus in the Persian Gulf is far more complicated than administrators at George Mason, in Virginia, initially thought when they embarked on the venture three and a half years ago.

For the past two months, administrators from George Mason have been negotiating with Edrak, the private educational company that owns the campus and has paid for George Mason to operate it in the sleepy emirate, 50 miles northeast of Dubai. It's not clear what role Sheik Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi, the crown prince and ruler of Ras al Khaymah, has played in the collapse of this arrangement, although he has been heavily invested in the venture from the beginning.

For the 2008-09 academic year, Edrak has provided George Mason with between $7-million and $8-million to operate a campus for some 180 students. The university decided to pull out of the venture when it became clear that Edrak was going to provide only about $6.5-million for 2009-10, yet it expected George Mason to enroll 300 students, Mr. Stearns said.

Those sort of budgetary constraints meant the university wouldn�t be able to continue providing students in Ras al Khaymah with the kind of education that would meet the standards expected at George Mason�s home campus, Mr. Stearns said.

The move took employees at the emirate campus by surprise.

�There had been rumors, but none of us really believed it was going to collapse like this,� says an administrator who didn�t want to be named. �But it turns out the investors really wanted to see some kind of profit.�

Mr. Stearns says that originally, Edrak�s investors � the identity of whom even he does not know, he says � had planned that the George Mason venture, which opened in 2006, would not break even for its first five years.

�In my honest opinion, there was some change of mind as to when the profit would begin,� Mr. Stearns said, adding that he suspects the investors' change of mind has been prompted by the global economic meltdown.


A Troubled Endeavor

Since it opened in Ras al Khaymah, George Mason has been beset by a number of problems revolving around administration, academic standards, and identity (The Chronicle, July 25, 2008). Student recruitment has been a particularly difficult challenge. This year only about 180 students enrolled at the campus, far fewer than the 2,000 students its planners hoped to enroll by 2011.

Mr. Stearns blames the campus�s recruitment difficulties on the lack of a flashy new campus (which Edrak and the crown prince had originally promised to build) and on Ras al Khaymah�s reputation as a sleepy desert town that lacks the flair of its wealthier neighbors like Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

But many staff at the campus blame the low enrollment numbers on George Mason�s admissions requirements, which are among the highest in the Persian Gulf region. It has been especially difficult to find students who satisfy a minimum score of 570 on the Toefl, the standard test of English as a foreign language � the same score required at the Virginia campus.

�People here feel there was some inflexibility on the part of the U.S. campus,� the administrator said from Ras al Khaymah by telephone. �The admissions process was handled completely in Fairfax, where they really didn�t have a grasp of the terrain here.�

For example, most high-school seniors who would consider enrolling at universities in the Persian Gulf don�t take the SAT, and most foreign branch campuses in the region don�t require it. But George Mason did, even of applicants who had taken British A-levels or completed the International Baccalaureate.

�A lot of students would find out that we wanted SAT's and wouldn�t bother applying,� the administrator said. �When we would tell that to the U.S. campus, we were just told to look harder.�

Mr. Stearns says that the faculty senate in Fairfax sets the admissions requirements for all George Mason students and that any compromises could have threatened the university�s accreditation.

�I�m sure that it was an issue, and I am sure that our partners thought it was an issue too,� he said.

Earlier this week, at a meeting of international education administrators, Andrew Flagel, George Mason's associate vice president of enrollment development, offered a blunt critique of the project, saying that grand visions jumped ahead of reality. Programs were selected to be offered at the campus without any prior market research. The nursing program, he said, takes three times as long as others in the region. "There's no data behind this hodgepodge" of programs, he observed.

Marketing efforts, which were handled by a local, private partner, were "truly horrible," he said, and university officials had to scramble every July to find students for the fall. There were also tensions with Emirati partners over whether the campus would educate primarily Emirati students or the local children of expatriates.

Mr. Flagel said that among other things, George Mason should have controlled all the marketing from the outset, done a market analysis before setting foot in the gulf, and stayed in constant communication with employees in the emirate.

Although he gave his talk on Monday, before the campus closure was announced, Mr. Flagel suggested it might be too late for George Mason to recover. The market is different now, he said, with new players who are entering without the bad press and administrative turmoil that saddled George Mason's campus.


Next Steps

For the 180 or so students in Ras al Khaymah, classes will continue until the end of the term, in mid-May. After that, students have been offered the opportunity to continue working toward their degrees at George Mason�s home campus in Fairfax, Va.

�They�ll have to figure out how to get here, and I don�t pretend that that�s not a significant cost,� Mr. Stearns says, adding that tuition and housing costs in Virginia are comparable to what students were paying in Ras al Khaymah.

Students who don�t want to leave the United Arab Emirates � or can�t because of the difficulties Middle Eastern students often encounter when trying to obtain student visas in the United States � are likely to face difficulty transferring to other local universities. Most of George Mason�s programs in Ras al Khaymah weren�t accredited by the emirates' Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, so students' credits won�t be recognized by other universities.

Edrak does plan, however, to open a university to fill the void left by George Mason in Ras al Khaymah, and it is expected to honor former students� credits.

By the end of the term, the 35 faculty and staff members in Ras al Khaymah, most of whom held contracts with Edrak, will be out of jobs. None of them were faculty members on George Mason�s home campus, and the university won�t create positions for them there, Mr. Stearns said.

Beth McMurtrie contributed to this article.

[kiefer]

Perhaps they can reopen it as the Royal Magic College of Hyderabad--although I hear it's a party magic school

[veiledsentiments]

No market research..

Requiring SATs and a 570 on the TOEFL...

Wow... did they ever deserve to fail. Anyone who has ever taught or worked in Gulf employment could have told them that this wasn't going to work.

VS

[Sheikh N Bake]

Yes but [while I was there, 2005-2007] they never adhered to 570 or, after the first academic semester, the SAT, anyway. They meant to at first but soon it was only lip service. They failed because of endless mismanagement from nearly all quarters. People got fired while sick; people got fired for failing the worst losers. They did hire a brilliant man with impressive credentials whom we thought would be our savior...but he quit after a month. No doubt the good doctor took the vital signs of the place as soon as he had warmed up his stethoscope and decided the patient was unquestionably terminal.

[ctmiezio]

George Mason Fairfax pulled the plug because they couldn't lower standards and still meet their accreditation standards. At least that was, I think, the big factor in them pulling the plug. I don't have inside information actually but this seems clear. Also EDRAK decided they wanted to stop losing money and so wanted to boost enrollment.

Though I am technically under a bond of secrecy, the story is out in the press and there will be an official announcement tomorrow, Mar 1st, about the new university which will take GMU-RAKs place.

There has been a lot of negative talk about GMURAK in Dave's and maybe it's deserved, maybe not, it's hard for me to say because I haven't worked there long and now maybe don't have a job (I'm awaiting news of the new university like everybody else). However as an RIP epitaph I'd just like to point out that after 10 years in this sometimes thankless racket, I found teaching at GMURAK was a surprising pleasure, with high quality students and high standards. I actually felt I was accomplishing something there, which is a novel feeling for me at least. I personally regret the passing of GMURAK and I think it's unfortunate that what we were trying to accomplish has gone unappreciated.

[Sheikh N Bake]

I worked at GMURAK for the first two years and I (formerly called GN2 here at Dave's for several years) am not known on this forum for making things up. Besides which, another colleague, Onceburned, backs me up in every detail on these boards. S/he also doesn't make things up.

In any case, lofty standards or not, it's generally not viable to run a four-year university with 100 or 150 students very long without heavy subsidies, and heavy subsidies were never part of the plan.

[ctmiezio]

Never suggested anybody was making anything up. I've only been at GMURAK a year and maybe things changed since your day, I wouldn't know. In any case it hardly matters any more, GMURAK is dead in 3 months.

[veiledsentiments]

I think that both of you are right. SnB was there in the past and as I recall he liked it a lot at the beginning in spite of the usual start-up problems. In other words, he too was happy after the first year. But these problems didn't iron out, but continued to deteriorate with mostly management issues. (right SnB?)

ctmeizio is still in his first year and many of the management are likely different. I can certainly see that having higher level students (instead of the usual mix we get in the Gulf) would be a pleasure to teach. Especially if you have small classes as you would with their low enrollment numbers.

GMU (a university I attended in the US in the '80s) jumped into a project with admittedly no serious research... and that was obvious from the start... right SnB? And we teachers are always the ones who have to deal with the messiness of it all...

I hope that they keep you on ctmiezio... Good Luck... do come back and let us know the fate of the teachers.

VS

[Sheikh N Bake]

VS is right. Things got so bad I almost forgot I liked it at first. We had about six good students in Foundation. They went into the freshman year along with a few direct-admission Indian students. Then we got a new intake of Foundation students who were even worse than the F's from the first year.

My housing was terrible, by the way. Maybe I could have done better with a Dh 20,000 allowance but when I arrived, the famous Indian management wouldn't allow me daytime hours to look for a place even though there weren't any classes yet. Even if there had been classes, I'm a big boy now, I put my pants on and brush my teeth all by myself and I could have taught the 3 or 4 classes and still looked around for better housing at the amazingly magnanimous allowance of 20K.

EFL faculty who had better housing than me paid the difference from their pockets

You know what? Edrak can stuff it, and GMU can stuff it for outsourcing to Edrak and then hiring that imperial ogre-woman from the UAE's government university accreditation council--yeah, that one who liked to fire people while they were out sick. The one who talked to me like a janitor who had wandered onto the wrong campus and had flies going in one ear and out the other. &$^# them.

At least she got relieved of her position too; I'll say that for them.

Apologies to VS; I'm sure the home campus is a fine place to study.

By the way, ctm, aren't you a content professor? Or are you EFL faculty? The Foundation students were generally of very low quality when I left, except for those few I mentioned, and there weren't any good ones to replace them. Maybe you're teaching direct-admission students.

I see the NY Times has come out with this story as well, on March 1st. I won't reproduce it here since it doesn't reveal anything that's not in the Chronicle piece. It's a bit sparser, in fact.

[oncebitten]

So the inevitable has happened!

In a previous posting I wrote:

"My own take on the situation (of GMU in RAK) is as follows. I do not believe that GMU's partners in the Emirates ever wished to have a full, thriving American campus in RAK. The real intent was to use the presence of GMU as window-dressing, a loss-leader aiming to draw in students from outside the UAE, or non-Emirati UAE students, who were attracted by the idea of an American university. ....... If the majority of interested parents and students were put off by the higher standards or costs, counselling would direct them to a range of other "American" degree options which would be significantly cheaper and easier to enter."

I stand by my words. And as GMU exits stage left, waiting in the wings is
--wait for it--THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF RAK !

Watch this space.

[trapezius]

Wow... this is news to me.

GMU is a fine university. I got accepted there for my MS degree (but decided to attend NC State).

How has Qatar been able to get it right? They have had long-running (relatively) campuses of US universities, and prestigious ones at that (Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, Georgetown, Texas A&M), and they don't seem to be plagued by problems such as these.

So, what's the latest on this? American University of RAK?

[anthropologist]

[Sheikh N Bake]

In another thread you will see that that is what Abu Dhabi and MIT are doing.