The Saudi government plans to send 70,000 students to 200 approved foreign institutions by 2030 under an updated approach for the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Scholarship Program. Eligible students will be streamed into one of four paths under the new strategy – the Pioneers Path, the Research & Development Path, the Providers Path, and the Promising Path:
The scholarship programme hinges on three pillars that take into account a continuum of planning for Saudi Arabia’s economic and societal goals (articulated in the macro-strategy, Vision 2030). The first is “early planning for young students for their educational journey at global institutions and universities”; the second is a strategy to elevate the kingdom’s competitiveness both locally and globally” through study abroad; and the third is a commitment to supporting graduates after they return from study abroad to “improve their readiness to join the labor market locally and globally.”
Both male and female students are eligible for the scholarship programme and can apply via this link.
Students who go to destinations such as the US, UK, Canada and Australia will not receive support for any English-language training required for their degree programmes, but students going to non-English-speaking destinations will receive support for language studies.
This is an important detail given that the previous massive Saudi scholarship programme, the “King Abdullah Scholarship Program (KASP)” sent tens of thousands of Saudi students to programmes primarily in the US and other English destinations and included funding for English-language studies. The current scholarship programme underlines the increasing complexity of student mobility in the 2020s and the rise of non-Western destinations.
At the same time, the Saudi government began offering English-language instruction to first graders last year, in a bid to build proficiency among school children before the secondary and tertiary levels of education.
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