New center helps make A&M a pioneer
BYLINE: JOHN AUSTIN, STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER
The new Texas A&M University at Qatar building takes up 595,000 square feet. It will house a new graduate engineering program this fall, as well as four existing programs.
Texas A&M interim President Ed Davis, second from right, tours the new building Sunday, the start of three days of festivities.
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Foreign students have long traveled to Texas for a higher education. Now, Texas has taken one of its landmark universities to the Middle East.
Tonight, a group of dignitaries including Gov. Rick Perry -- an alumnus -- and former President George H.W. Bush, will help inaugurate Texas A&M University at Qatar's new home: a multimillion-dollar building that emphasizes the university's commitment to globalizing higher education.
"We think Qatar is in the vanguard of this. We see nothing but upside," said David Prior, A&M provost and executive vice president. "All the costs are paid for by Qatar. It does not cost the state of Texas, but it affords us an enormous educational opportunity."
The marble-finished building, designed by Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretta, has more than 30 labs and will house four undergraduate engineering programs. With the new building in Education City, A&M is equipped to expand its Qatar enrollment to about 100 students and begin a graduate engineering program this fall. The A&M-Qatar programs, which opened in 2003 and have been housed in a building shared with another university, will be vetted by two U.S. accrediting authorities, Prior said.
A growing movement
Spurred by affluent host countries' desire for graduates of leading Western universities, and universities' desire to reach booming foreign markets, more than 80 institutions now operate offshore bricks-and-mortar branches. Universities in Great Britain, Canada and even Russia are also building campuses in places like the United Arab Emirates, but U.S. universities account for about half of the campuses.
In many cases, full-time faculty members from the home campus are based at the branch for extended periods. Faculty members are also hired overseas. A&M just created a tenure track for Qatar faculty.
The London-based Observatory on Borderless Higher Education said in a recent report that reasons for opening overseas branches include "full control over delivery, prominence in an increasingly competitive transnational market, greater opportunities for external funding and changing relationships in some host countries."
Qatar, which has the world's third-largest natural gas reserve and is awash in petro dollars, has in the past sent students overseas to study.
"The problem was, a lot of them didn't come back," said Robert Baxter, spokesman for the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, which is paying for the project. "It was a brain drain.
"We need engineers," Baxter said. "It'll be some time before we are pursuing disciplines purely out of academic interest. We're not, at the moment, talking about a philosophy faculty."
To build an educational infrastructure and create a homegrown knowledge-based economy, the foundation is bankrolling what Baxter called a "multiversity."
Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar is the first U.S. school to offer its doctorate of medicine abroad.
"It's going extremely well," said Antonio Gotto, dean of Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York. "The first students will graduate in the Class of 2008."
At the medical school's Education City campus, students from Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, Egypt and other countries are enrolled in a six-year program leading to a doctorate of medicine.
Five U.S. research universities share the 2,500-acre Education City site in Doha. Besides A&M and Cornell, Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service offers a bachelor's in international politics; Carnegie Mellon University offers computer science and business administration; and Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts offers design and art programs. There's talk about bringing another U.S. university into the complex to offer a journalism degree, said Desi Burns Porter, assistant director of public affairs at A&M-Qatar. And Baxter, the Qatar Foundation spokesman, said the foundation is considering bringing in a university with a business program. Law and public administration are also under consideration.
The student body across Education City is 50 percent to 60 percent Qatari, but there's no quota, Baxter said. Anybody can apply.
All the universities are coed except VCU, which is recruiting its first female students, Baxter said.
"Our students may have a roommate from Carnegie Mellon," Porter said by phone from Qatar. "As far as we know, this model has never been done anywhere in the world."
Singapore's program
Other countries are also providing incentives to lure Western universities.
The Singapore Economic Development Board expects the education sector's gross domestic product contribution to rise from 1.9 percent ($1.8 billion) to 5 percent by 2015. The international student population there has grown to 72,000 in 2005 from 50,000 in 2002, according to the board.
Like Qatar, Singapore, which announced a goal in 1997 of attracting 10 world-class universities within a decade, aims to keep some graduates in the country to draw more research and development and investment.
New York University's Tisch School of the Arts will open classes at a new Singapore campus in the fall. The graduate film-production program will be housed in a renovated 45,000-square-foot former education ministry building. As in Qatar, the host country is picking up the tab.
"The Singapore government was so supportive, so good to do business with," said Mary Schmidt Campbell, Tisch dean. "Everything has been so clear, prompt. They present themselves so well. They support you financially."
The Tisch School of the Arts Asia, Singapore Campus, will offer a Master of Fine Arts degree and will eventually have about 230 students, who will pay the same tuition as those in New York, she said. It will have a full-time faculty of about five
"Film is a global enterprise," Campbell said. "We think that it is beneficial to us as a school to expand our boundaries."
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is also part of Singapore's Global Schoolhouse program. It is scheduled to begin offering classes in September. Plans call for undergraduate and executive-level master's degrees in hospitality management.
Duke has opened a medical school there, and the University of Chicago operates a branch campus there and in London.
"Why did we do it? First, to bring our model of education to the world, " said William Kooser, associate dean of executive MBA programs at the University of Chicago. "Second, to learn more about what's going on in the business community. Third, to increase our influence and visibility around the world. We believe our view is important, and others can benefit from that.
"We fill up the classes" in the Singapore program, he said. "In fact, we're oversubscribed."
Australia's University of New South Wales opened in Singapore this year and plans to attract about 15,000 students in a range of majors in the next 15 to 20 years. As at most other branch campuses, classes are taught in English.
Fit not always right
As welcoming as Singapore officials are, they expect results, no matter how big a university's name. A deal with Johns Hopkins University in Singapore to train graduate biomedical sciences students and conduct advanced research was recently canceled after Singapore spent a reported $50 million on the program, according to the Web site Inside Higher Ed. The university "failed to yield results" or bring in the expected top-notch scientists, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported.
And while there are handsome inducements to go abroad, some U.S. universities decide that a foreign branch doesn't make sense. After evaluating an offer worth about $100 million, University of Washington administrators said no last summer to a deal that would have planted a branch of the Seattle school in Singapore.
The University of Texas at Austin declined several years ago to start a Qatar campus.
"We had our chance," said Ben Streetman, UT dean of engineering. "The primary emphasis was on petroleum engineering. We have the No.1 or No. 2 petroleum engineering department in the country. We didn't want to run a university for somebody."
However, Streetman said, UT has provided "a lot of work" in setting up curriculum for engineering schools in less-well-off nations such as Trinidad and Tobago.
Although A&M had to abandon a branch in Japan in the mid-1990s after local political support weakened, the Qatar reigning family's blessing for the project in Education City has convinced A&M that the new campus is on solid ground.
"It's a spectacularly beautiful building," said Prior, the A&M provost, who planned to lead a delegation of College Station students to the three-day opening in Qatar. "It's two conjoined buildings -- one part education, one part research."
Porter, the branch spokeswoman, said the building cost an estimated $142 million. Pressed for more details, Prior was a little vague.
But, he said, "It's not maroon, but it's certainly not burnt orange."
John Austin, 817-548-5418 jaustin@star-telegram.com