Not many people would have predicted it would have been the University of New Haven that would be the first to get a Western branch campus in Saudi Arabia over the line.

Yet the Connecticut-based institution last month announced that it had become the first to be granted permission to open a campus in Riyadh’s “Misk City” – a purpose-built “non-profit” city designed for Saudi’s youth population.

Despite concerns over human rights abuses and its reputation for bureaucracy, the country, with its grand Vision 2030 that looks to transform its economy away from oil to a knowledge economy, has long sparked the interest of global universities looking to expand.��

With a large youth population and growing economy, many – including the University of Wollongong in Australia and Heriot-Watt University in Scotland – have also explored plans to open campuses in the country.

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New Haven’s president, Jens Frederiksen, told Times Higher Education that there was “some shock” that it was his university that managed to be the first to get a campus up and running.

He said he has been “blown away” by the transformation happening in Saudi, having visited the country nine times as part of the negotiations.

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Its College of Business and Digital Innovation, which will form the first “phase” of New Haven’s plans in the region, is due to open in September and is currently undergoing its first recruitment round.

Saudi’s appeal for higher education institutions lies in its large youth population, Frederiksen said, and its grand economic transformation plans, as laid out in Vision 2030, which also include targets to increase women’s participation in the labour market.

“You’re experiencing a complete explosion there in terms of just the appetite for talent, and the ambition to live up to these audacious goals,” he said, adding that to “supercharge an entire economy” there needs to be a “supercharging of skills-based learning”.

These opportunities made the “long” journey to announcing the campus worth the gamble despite the “trials and tribulations” that come along with embarking on a “journey that hasn’t been done before”, said Frederiksen.

He expected recruitment for September to remain modest, as the institution could not announce the campus location until May, which took a “Herculean lift” to get over the line. Despite this, there has been “strong” interest so far, and he said would like to see the Misk campus grow to 2,000 undergraduates in the coming years. The university will also look at opening more colleges in Saudi over the next eight to 10 years, based on the needs of skills and the economy.

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Salman Al-Mazini/Wikipedia (CC0 1.0)

Staff at the campus will be made up of a mix of academics from the region currently applying “in their hundreds” for roles, and staff from the US campus who have agreed to move over. However, Frederiksen admitted that renewed conflict in the Middle East “gives people a little bit of pause”.��

The conflict – which saw universities in Saudi resort to online learning – has impacted supply chains and prices in the process of building the campus, and Frederiksen was conscious over what it meant to be a US institution operating in the area, amid a US-led conflict.��

“So far, we’re ploughing ahead as usual, but it’s not lost on us that there’s been some incidents particularly targeted at US [institutions], even internal to Saudi,” he said.

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Stressing that those directly impacted by the conflict have been most acutely affected, he added renewed conflict is “obviously not ideal for anyone”.

Frederiksen conceded that conflict could dampen international interest in the region. He said higher education institutions in the West are “reluctant” to “make moves” amid growing questions over the value of a degree and challenges to international recruitment, and many are asking whether you can both “stabilise” and grow.

“I think we’ve shown that you can, but I think that the general appetite is more like, ‘well, let’s just sit back and wait this out until the sector changes’. Then you add instability in the region to that, and then I think you are looking at a potential stalling.”

He added that Saudi is trying to spearhead “what it takes to prepare the next generation for a world that is incredibly complex”.

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“I think [Saudi] is the biggest story in global higher education that’s coming,” Frederiksen said, “but it hasn’t received the attention it deserves.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com