U.S. Opens Its Doors to Iraqi Students

WASHINGTON -- As the U.S. military gets ready to withdraw its last troops from Iraq this month, the State Department and Iraqi government are stepping up efforts to enroll thousands of Iraqi students in American universities.

The number of Iraqi students studying in the U.S. was up 45% for the 2010-11 school year, according to statistics compiled by the Institute of International Education and State Department. Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has earmarked $1 billion to be spent on education initiatives over the next several years and the Iraqi government will announce this week that it will fund scholarships for 2,500 students to attend U.S. universities in 2012 —quadrupling enrollment of Iraqi students in American universities, said Abdul Hadi al-Khalili, the cultural attaché at the Iraq Embassy in Washington.

As concerns grow in Washington about waning American influence in Iraq as the U.S. military presence concludes, al-Khalili said the initiative gives the United States a chance to help shape the next generation of Iraqi leaders.

"There's a very valuable opportunity here for the United States," said al-Khalili, who has been tasked by the Iraqi government with recruiting U.S. universities to take Iraqi students.

While the Iraqi government has begun pouring money into education, the State Department has launched an outreach blitz to identify some of Iraq's brightest students and connect them with American universities.

Recruiters from 22 American universities attended a college fair sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in October in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil. They met with nearly 1,500 students, most of whom were already approved for Iraqi government-funded scholarships.

"Their future sits with reconnecting with the rest of the world, and being reconnected with America — given the events of the last eight years — is especially crucial," said Suzanne Bodoin, a cultural affairs officer in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

The State Department is also assisting Iraq's Ministry of Education as it gets ready to hold a major conference in Washington in January to recruit American universities to bring students to U.S. campuses.

Al-Maliki and President Obama are also scheduled to meet on Monday at the White House for wide-ranging talks as the two countries prepare to shift to a more normal bilateral footing. Partnering between the two countries on higher education and cultural exchanges is on the agenda, according to the White House.

With half the current Iraqi population younger than 19 years of age and a quarter of the population born after the 2003 U.S. invasion, the Iraqis are pressing to make strides in education quickly, according to Brett McGurk, a former National Security Council adviser on Iraqi issues in both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.

"It is in our interest to encourage this new generation to study outside Iraq — and in the United States," McGurk recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Iraqi students first started coming to American universities more than 70 years ago, al-Khalili said. In the late 1940s, Iraq had as many as 40 students enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley, and Nazik al-Malaika —an Iraqi poet who is considered one of the Arab world's most-renowned contemporary artists — earned her master's degree in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1959.

From 1977 to 1987, the Iraqi government sent more than 1,100 students each year to American universities. By the late 1980s—with the government financially weakened by the Iran-Iraq war—the number of students sent abroad began to decline and the numbers plummeted further in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq has experienced devastating brain drain as the country's elite fled the country in droves during the height of the insurgency.

Since the beginning of the war, the U.S. government has contributed millions of dollars to ongoing educational and exchange programs—including re-establishing the prestigious Fulbright scholarship as well as a short-term visiting scholar program.

Mohammed Saeed, 28, a Baghdad physician who is currently studying at the University of Kentucky on a Fulbright scholarship, said that as a medical student he and his friends had big dreams of changing Iraq. Once they got out of school, however, that hope was diminished by endemic problems — from corruption to outdated training — that plague nearly every sector of Iraq's government.

Saeed said that the experience at Kentucky is making him a more capable physician, but perhaps more importantly, it's renewing his hope.

"This is giving us the tools to hopefully fix some of the problems," Saeed said. "The more of us that can get this kind of experience, the better Iraq will be."