DUBAI // Dubai International Academic City has unveiled ambitious plans to expand into an education hub for the entire Middle East, North Africa and Asia, with nearly 40 universities catering for 40,000 students.
Dr Ayoub Kazim, the executive director, said he believed that graduates educated in the city would play a vital part in developing the UAE’s “knowledge economy”.
Diac opened last year and is described as the world’s first higher education free-zone. It will be completed in about seven years.
Recently Ras al Khaimah announced its own education free-zone on a similar scale.
Currently there are 10,000 students at 25 universities based in Diac and Dubai Knowledge Village, another free-zone run by Dr Kazim that is also part of Tecom Investments, a Dubai Holding subsidiary. “We need to attract the talent and we are looking forward to having Dubai as a city based on the knowledge economy by 2020,” said Dr Kazim.
Dr Kazim, a US-educated engineer, says he has based his vision for Diac on “the Boston model”, referring to the US city that is home to dozens of universities and colleges.
“Boston is considered to be an education destination, not because they have Harvard and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], but because they have over 60 academic institutions for students at all levels,” he said.
“It’s not just the Ivy League catering to the top two per cent. What then is going to happen to the other 98 per cent? They are catering to all levels.”
Diac’s growth is part of a wider expansion in higher education in the UAE over the coming decade, much of it fuelled by the opening of UAE branches of foreign institutions.
Ras al Khaimah plans a higher education free-zone with universities with a combined enrolment of 38,000, while Abu Dhabi will see the opening this year of a branch of Khalifa University and the building of campuses for the Paris-Sorbonne and New York University.
The federal universities – Zayed University, UAE University and the Higher Colleges of Technology – have seen admissions this year rise by nearly a quarter following an increase in government funding.
Daniel Bardsley