Globalisation is accelerating in the world of international finance. It is also happening in the world of higher education and in a way that positions the UAE to benefit from both.
The challenge for Dubai as it moves ahead in its drive to be one of the world's knowledge capitals is to become a world class global education city as well as a global financial city.
As His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, Dubai is engaged in a fight "to alleviate poverty, generating better education, creating economic opportunity for people, and teaching people everywhere how to be entrepreneurs, to believe in themselves."
Launching Dubai International Academic City as a component of Dubai's Knowledge Village is part of a bold vision to lead in higher education, health and housing.
This August, the first North American university, Michigan State, will open its campus there, joining 20 other institutes of higher learning from other countries around the world.
This growing academic community is part of plan to host tens of thousands of students at 37 international universities by 2015.
In achieving the promise of Academic City, Dubai may also find itself able to strive to solve some of the great health and security issues that are confronting all of human kind. It could bring together some of the world's greatest minds and develop an academic community that is truly global.
Dubai's institutions can also take part in the important global effort to rescue threatened scholars.
The campuses being established can host Fulbright faculty and provide fertile ground for the emerging global leaders being developed by another of Shaikh Mohammad's visionary programmes, The Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Scholarship Programme.
This will broaden the base of students who can benefit from higher education, expand cultural understanding, and forge connections with the global higher education community to address pressing world problems.
Shaikh Mohammad has said that education and entrepreneurship are the twin underpinnings for building a safer world. National policies relating to travel, immigration, security and human and intellectual property rights are foreign policy matters. So too is widening access.
Creating more educational opportunity and making international a part of what it means to be educated are more important in the wake of 9/11 than ever before.
The last time that most professors agreed that the world was flat, students and scholars travelled freely around the world to attend courses and symposia at such far-flung locations as Plato's Academy, Nalanda University in India (also founded in the 5th Century BC), Nanjing (founded in 258 AD), Constantinople, Al Karaouine in Fes (859), Al Azhar (988), Dar Al Hikma (1004), Parma (1064), Quoc Tu Giam in Hanoi (1076), Bologna (1088), Paris (1150), Oxford (1169) and Cambridge (1209).
Before Columbus proved that the world was round, in fact, some 50 "world class" universities had been founded, many of which are still in operation. In all of these institutions, students could expect to be taught by the best scholars from all over the world.
Unique free zone
In the Gulf region today, distinguished universities from all over the world are creating branch campuses. Of the 82 that were in existence worldwide in 2006, 26 branch campuses were in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan, and those numbers are expanding rapidly.
Qatar's Education City is now home to many international branch campuses, with some well-recognised United States universities leading the way.
And Dubai's International Academic City, a unique free zone dedicated to higher education, is part of the emirate's long-term strategy to serve as a regional base for premier international higher education institutions.
For most of higher education, unfortunately, globalisation is still quite rare. Only a small fraction of the world's 17,000 higher education institutions has campuses abroad. Most are in just a few regions, and half of all the branch campuses are part of US institutions.
Currently, 2.7 million students seek a higher education outside their home country, an increase of 54 per cent since 1999. Most of these students attend institutions in just eight host countries - the US, the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, China and Japan - of which the US hosts the largest share.
The good news is that demand is rising so rapidly that the world will welcome many other destinations.
Almost a third of today's international students are seeking an overseas education in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Unesco data from 2006 showed that only 3 per cent of the world's globally-mobile students were going to the Arab world.
That number will clearly increase once the new data reflect current initiatives in the region. But there is so much further to go.
For if history is a contest between education and catastrophe, it is in all of our interests to make sure that education wins. The UAE has a good start to assuring that outcome.
Allan E. Goodman is president and CEO of the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit organisation founded in 1919 with headquarters in New York City and 18 offices around the world. He is a former executive dean of the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University in Washington DC. More information about the author and his organisation is available at www.iie.org.
