From food to nuclear engineers, nearly everything in the UAE is imported. But when it comes to higher education, intelligence and youthful vigour have always been among the country’s more unfortunate exports. That may be changing. With the announcement that the American Middle States Commission on Higher Education has accredited Zayed University – the first non-American institution to receive such an acknowledgement from the commission – the UAE may now be able to turn out the best and brightest from its own home-grown institutions.
This is a major step for Zayed University students, who are now better equipped to become players in the global market for ideas. The timing is also fortuitous: competition is heating up for top jobs throughout the world. More and more recent graduates from other fast-growing nations are entering the market for highly-skilled labour. Like ambitious young people in China and India, the students of Zayed University will soon be able to join this global corps of enterprising youth without ever having to leave their own borders.
That’s good for them, but it’s also a boon for the UAE and its germinal institutions. Emirati students who study in their homeland may be more likely to remain here, where their skills and know-how are in great demand.
The accreditation of Zayed University also brings the UAE one step closer to easing the unstated and uncomfortable requirement that the brightest Emirati students must be educated abroad in order for them truly to succeed at home. While foreign education for the UAE’s future leaders has been a necessary step in the country’s rapid development, the idea is culturally untenable in the long term.
The full spirit of Emiratisation demands that the emirates not only staff their companies and government institutions with well-educated nationals, but that eventually those nationals be educated in the UAE’s own universities. The day is coming when the cleverest young Emiratis will stop looking to the Harvards and Oxfords of the world to get the best educations.
A change in attitude toward Emirati education will also herald changing perceptions of the nation itself. A strong system of higher education is one of the more important indicators of a mature national identity. Another is medicine. Today, many people feel that if they develop a serious illness they need to travel abroad to get the best treatment. But this too, in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi, is beginning to change. In the last 10 years, the UAE’s internationally accredited hospitals have become regional destinations for those seeking the best care.
This is the year of Emirati identity, and while it is essential that language, culture and tradition are fostered to strengthen our sense of what it means to be a citizen of the UAE, there is another, equally vital aspect to national character – and that is a sense of self-confidence. Education and health care are touchstones of this, which is one of the many reasons why the accreditation of Zayed University is so significant.