Iraq seeks to educate more students in U.S.

WASHINGTON -- The Iraqi government wants America to mold its best and brightest.

Following Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's pledge last year to fund scholarships for 10,000 Iraqi students to study in the United States, the Iraqi government has dispatched several top officials to Washington as part of an effort to raise interest in their country's students.

"No country can get out of the suffering and backwardness without the development of higher education," said Ali al-Adeeb, Iraq's minister of higher education, who met Tuesday with State Department officials.

Adeeb and several of his top deputies will continue their pitch during a two-day conference with administrators and scholars from 50 universities — including New York University and University of Pennsylvania— that begins today.

From 1977 to 1987, the Iraqi government sent more than 1,100 of its best students each year to American universities. But by the late 1980s, with the country financially weakened by the Iran-Iraq war, the number sent abroad began declining, and plummeted further in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

After the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq experienced devastating brain drain as the country's elite fled in droves.

"If the occupation left some with a bad taste, then it is our cooperation (on higher education and cultural issues) that will help erase these ideas," al-Adeeb told State Department officials on Tuesday.

Iraqi students first started coming to American universities more than 70 years ago, said Abdul Hadi al-Khalili, the cultural attaché at Iraq's embassy in Washington.

Most of the students who have come in more recent years have first needed to enroll in intensive English study programs, but that hasn't lessened the enthusiasm of more than two dozen universities that have already pledged to enroll Iraqis, al-Khalili said.

At the University of Missouri, 13 graduate students from Iraq are enrolled in the college of engineering. The university is now considering starting a pilot program for 2013 to enroll undergraduates for their final two years of study, said Vladislav Likholetov, director of international partnerships and initiatives at the engineering college.

The draw of the Iraqis for American universities is twofold: "We are genuinely interested in making our student body more diverse, because we want our students to be exposed to all sorts of people and cultures so they're ready for the global world they will be living in," Likholetov said. "They are also fully paid. It's an additional plus not to have to think about funding for them."

Nazanin Tork, a graduate admissions officer at the University of Cincinnati, said her university wants to enroll 20 Iraqi students in 2012, even though many will need a semester or two of English training before they can begin their coursework. "The way we see it is, it is important to help these students so they can go back and rebuild their country," she said.

The U.S. has contributed millions of dollars since 2003 to educational and exchange programs, including re-establishing the prestigious Fulbright scholarship and a short-term visiting scholar program. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad also is preparing to launch a $1 million English-as-a-second-language program in Baghdad to help prepare Iraqi students for U.S. education.