Good Friday morning, this is Anastasia Yuglova and you're listening to the Cato Daily

Podcast for February 2nd.

Our guest today is Raja Kamal, Associate Dean for Resource Development at the Harris

School for Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago

and a contributor to Ms. Bahalaria, Cato's Arabic website.

It's a known fact that a well-developed university system is critical to economic vitality.

But as Raja explains in today's podcast, Arab universities are not graduating the kind of

students who are equipped to handle the demands of the global marketplace

and to improve the economic standing of one of the world's richest and at the same time

least developed regions.

How do you come to the conclusion that graduates of Arab universities are ill prepared for the challenges of the global economy?

Well, if you look at a lot of the students right now graduating in the Arab world,

if you look at a country specifically, like Saudi Arabia for example, that's a nation

that has approximately 7 million expats working there. The reason why is because obviously they

cannot fill up the positions that they have by local graduates that are

Saudis so clearly the universities are not preparing students they're not

graduating students that are equipped to handle the modern transformation of global economy in Saudi Arabia.

Now what kind of a disconnect is there between Arab universities and the real world?

Well, Arab universities, typically the students are taught what to think instead of how to think and

this is something that's very very dangerous and there are as they graduate from various

disciplines throughout the Arab world they have a lot of majors that are unemployable and that is very dangerous in a very global

economy that requires dynamic changes and instant reaction to how things are moving. Which are the subjects that students tend to gravitate towards, for example, are math and hard sciences in good shape?

...