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[Sheikh N Bake]

Here are some excerpts from an article in the current Chronicle of Higher Education It's exactly what VS and I predicted:

Silicon Oasis [in Dubai] is largely empty. And Michigan State is looking to attract students from nearby campuses with tuition discounts of 50 percent.

Nobody expected the recession," says Mr. Abushagur [director of Knowledge Village] . "And to be honest with you, we don't know what's really happening here. You just can't find the data."

...

But the community's key ingredient�the high tech firms�never came. Most of the freshly built office towers and apartment blocks appear to be largely empty
...

Most foreign university campuses here�there are more than two dozen in operation�depend on the children of those expatriates for their student base. Thus the financial crisis has translated into a dwindling demand for admission.

Michigan State, for example, enrolls only about 100 students�well short of the 250 it had expected to have by this point, says Brendan Mullan, executive director of the campus.


No kidding! Sound familiar??


...

The fact that American universities like Michigan State and the Rochester Institute of Technology opened campuses in the midst of such looming market pressures and are now struggling to attract students suggests to Mr. Schoepp that they didn't do the right kind of due diligence.

In other words they didn't bother looking at GMU's experience. Or the experience of 40 American campuses in Japan circa 1990.

Rochester Inst. of Technology is also struggling.
At least RIT has promised its students they will be able to complete their degrees no matter what, even if it means a free ride in Rochester, NY.

This all sound familiar?

Too bad--recessions are good for university enrollment in the US--but not Dubai.[/b]

[Sheikh N Bake]

...and an interesting though hardly surprising comparison with Qatar

In Qatar, a foundation controlled by the ruling al-Thani family has paid for six American institutions � Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M, and Virginia Commonwealth Universities � to open and operate campuses in a development called Education City.

"This is not about making money," says Charles E. Thorpe, dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. "We collect tuition and turn it over to the Qatar Foundation. They pay our operating costs."

Mr. Thorpe won't disclose what the campus's operating budget is, but the fact that it employs 47 faculty members for just 183 students suggests that operating costs significantly outpace tuition revenue. It would be cheaper, Mr. Thorpe notes, to pack all 183 students off to Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh.

"It's incredibly costly to do undergraduate education this way � probably more expensive than anywhere in the world," Mr. Guhr, the consultant, said. "But they're trying, relentlessly, to drive things from the top."

[GulfProf]

This is an extremely interesting conversation. I've been watching the phenomenon of American-style education (both in its technical and "liberal arts" forms) at branch campuses and indigenous universities since coming to the region several years ago.

I know no one has a crystal ball but what do you think this global economic downturn and the ongoing debt crisis in Dubai is going to spell for NYUAD?

[Sheikh N Bake]

I think it will probably spell doom for NYU in AD...putting aside any economic downturns.

MIT (or was it Yale? anyway, one of the prestigious ones) is doing some behind-the-scenes work in AD helping an Emirati university get on its feet. MIT officials say they do not want to get involved in establishing a branch campus in the Middle East because there is no way it could ever come close to resembling any kind of MIT experience. Furthermore they don't feel they'd ever get enough students to make it viable. Maybe AD could subsidize it like they do in Qatar, but MIT thinks it's a joke to have a 100-student campus with maybe a little gym and four classrooms and call it "MIT."

Thinking maybe recruit students from, say, China (where degrees from the top US universities are THE prestige currency these days)? Guess what--no Chinese would stoop to studying in the Middle East no matter what the name on the gate says.