[lg policy] Iraq seeks to educate more students in U.S.

[Harold Schiffman]

Iraq seeks to educate more students in U.S.
By Aamer Madhani, USA TODAY


WASHINGTON – The Iraqi government wants the USA to mold its best and brightest.

Following Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's pledge last year to fund
scholarships for 10,000 Iraqi students to study in the United States,
the Iraqi government has dispatched several top officials to
Washington as part of an effort to raise interest in their country's
students.
"No country can get out of the suffering and backwardness without the
development of higher education," said Ali al-Adeeb, Iraq's minister
of higher education, who met Tuesday with State Department officials.
Adeeb and several of his top deputies will continue their pitch during
a two-day conference with administrators and scholars from 50
universities — including New York University and University of
Pennsylvania— that begins today.

>>From 1977 to 1987, the Iraqi government sent more than 1,100 of its
best students each year to American universities. But by the late
1980s, with the country financially weakened by the Iran-Iraq War, the
number sent abroad began declining, and plummeted further in the
aftermath of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

After the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq experienced devastating brain
drain as the country's elite fled in droves.
"If the occupation left some with a bad taste, then it is our
cooperation (on higher education and cultural issues) that will help
erase these ideas," Adeeb told State Department officials on Tuesday.

Iraqi students first started coming to American universities more than
70 years ago, said Abdul Hadi al-Khalili, the cultural attaché at
Iraq's embassy in Washington. Most of the students who have come in
more recent years have first needed to enroll in intensive English
study programs, but that hasn't lessened the enthusiasm of more than
two dozen universities that have already pledged to enroll Iraqis,
al-Khalili said.

At the University of Missouri, 13 graduate students from Iraq are
enrolled in the college of engineering. The university is now
considering starting a pilot program for 2013 to enroll undergraduates
for their final two years of study, said Vladislav Likholetov,
director of international partnerships and initiatives at the
engineering college.

The draw of the Iraqis for American universities is twofold: "We are
genuinely interested in making our student body more diverse, because
we want our students to be exposed to all sorts of people and cultures
so they're ready for the global world they will be living in,"
Likholetov said. "They are also fully paid. It's an additional plus
not to have to think about funding for them."

Nazanin Tork, a graduate admissions officer at the University of
Cincinnati, said her university wants to enroll 20 Iraqi students in
2012, even though many will need a semester or two of English training
before they can begin their coursework. "The way we see it is, it is
important to help these students so they can go back and rebuild their
country," she said.

The U.S. has contributed millions of dollars since 2003 to educational
and exchange programs, including re-establishing the prestigious
Fulbright scholarship and a short-term visiting scholar program. The
U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is preparing to launch a $1 million
English-as-a-second-language program in Baghdad to help prepare Iraqi
students for U.S. education.

The vast majority of funding for Iraqis studying in the U.S. is coming
from Iraq's central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government
in northern Iraq. The Iraqi government also has required foreign oil
companies bidding to develop Iraq's oil fields to fund education and
training programs for Iraqis.

Adam Ereli, the principal deputy assistant secretary of State for
educational and cultural affairs, called the goal set by al-Maliki to
send thousands of students to the USA as "aspirational" but
"reachable." Ereli credited the Iraqi government for putting a focus
on educating its populace.

"They are looking at rebuilding their physical and human
infrastructure," Ereli said.

Mohammed Saeed, 28, a Baghdad physician who is studying at the
University of Kentucky on a Fulbright scholarship, said he and his
friends had big dreams of changing Iraq. Once they got out of school,
however, that hope was diminished by endemic problems, from corruption
to outdated training, that plague nearly every sector of the Iraqi
government.

Saeed said he found new hope in Kentucky.

"This is giving us the tools to hopefully fix some of the problems,"
he said. "The more of us that can get this kind of experience, the
better Iraq will be."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-02-21/iraq-students-education-usa/53198906/1

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