Insights into Higher Education Recruiting in the Middle East, North Africa & Eurasia

Finally arrived in Boston for the OACAC BOS10 – Overseas Association for College Admission Counseling Conference. Traffic delays brought me into the city well past midnight, and onto the Northeastern campus at almost 1.30am. I remembered that the last email from the OACAC team had mentioned an iPhone App, since I didn’t have my agenda on me, I quickly downloaded it in the hopes it would actually be, you know, helpful.

Wow, thanks so much to the web development team at Northeaststern for putting the tjme into developing the rockin’ OACAC BOS10 conference app for the iPhone. A simple to use interface allows even the frazzled traveler to stay organized. The interface and nice and simple:

Screenshot - OACAC BOS10 App

The agenda is easy to access, each session is listed on there, and all the pretty social media icons are easy to access (facebook, twitter, flickr).  Be sure to properly tag the conference if you will be tweeting with the #BOS10 hashtag (however, I think lots of people will just use the #OACAC10 hashtag as well).

Screenshot - Sessions

The *only* item I would have added would have been a campus map – or maybe that was only needed while searching for the housing dorm at 1.30am after arriving on that much delayed flight.

NAFSA better not have ANY excuses for not having an app available for next year’s conference!

If you didn’t already download it, what are you waiting for?! See you all in a few hours!

The news coming out of Dubai this morning is that Michigan State University is closing down their campus effective immediately.  While the MSU campus was struggling financially, they were pushing forward with a heavy recruiting schedule throughout the Middle East & many other countries. However, finding students who met admissions standards and who were interested in staying on the Dubai campus was difficult.

So far, the only article I’ve seen has been in the UAE-based “The National” – which strangely included this quote:

Prof Kim Wilcox, the provost and vice-president of MSU, said that in the current climate many students and parents were not keen on the idea of studying in the US.

Apparently Professor Wilcox has either been misquoted or has not followed MSU’s kick-ass international recruiting team & their fantastic success in bringing students on to the East Lansing campus from all over the world.

You can read more about this in the National

[Update] There is a short update about this on Inside Higher Ed

The PR office at NYU Abu Dhabi must have been working overtime this weekend, articles in both the New York Times & Inside Higher Ed this morning talk about the mix of students making up the inaugural class. US Educational Group is proud to have been part of the recruitment effort!

N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi Scours Globe for Top Students

The Worlds Honor College?

NYU Abu Dhabi recruiting with US Educational Group

NYU Abu Dhabi - working on those High School students!

At a recent international higher-ed mini-conference I attended a session discussing the influx of students from Saudi Arabia and how its changed the landscape of the campus and the type of issues its presented. One of the main issues, it seemed to me, was the adjustment to the style of learning was really difficult for the students. The concept of US-style of learning is so at odds with the methods these students have used all their lives, memorize, regurgitate, do not question the professor. Suddenly they’re required to think cognitively, debate their classmates, question the professor, and analyze before answering.

Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

Its a tough chasm to bridge, and it really takes a significant amount of “deprogramming”. I’m of the thought that if you have an Intensive English Lanaguage program on campus, one of the most crucial topics to cover is study skills & learning methods.  That’s why this New York Times article about the American University of Cairo caught my eye:  A Campus Where Unlearning Is First

These are the kinds of questions posed to undergraduate students entering this [American University of Cairo] 90-year-old university during what the president, David D. Arnold, called a first year of “disorientation.” During disorientation, the students — 85 percent of them Egyptians — are taught to learn in ways quite at odds with the traditional method of teaching in this country, where instructors lecture, students memorize and tests are exercises in regurgitation.