Culture & Education | Friday 4 September, 2015 5:02 am |

Saudi Arabia and the United States have enjoyed a fruitful relationship for over eight decades. This has been driven by shared interests and a vision of the late King Abdul Aziz to ensure that the Kingdom has wide and beneficial relations with the entire world, without prejudicing deep-held values and principles based on Islam.
With the discovery of oil, the Kingdom used its newfound economic status to ensure rapid development on all fronts. Apart from a massive focus on upgrading its infrastructure, there was a particular focus on the education and training of its citizens on the secular and religious fronts. This was based on the recognition that people are the true wealth of the nation.
Under the guidance of the late King Abdul Aziz, there were various institutions of learning set up in the Kingdom, with top educators brought in from other Arab countries. In addition, in 1927, Saudi citizens were granted scholarships to study in other Arab countries. It was only later that the king expanded the scholarship program to include the top universities in Europe and the United States.
Historians are not in agreement about when the scholarship program started in Europe and the United States. However, many believe that it began in 1936. According to the government’s records, the first group of Saudi students graduated from American universities in 1952. There were three who completed their undergraduate degrees and six passing with master’s degrees.
The Saudi cultural mission in the United States has records indicating that the late Abdullah bin Hamoud Al-Toriqi, the first petroleum and mineral resources minister, was the first Saudi student sent on a scholarship to the United States in 1948. This was followed by 30 Saudi students at the American University in Beirut who were sent to study at the University of Texas in 1949, according to Saudi Press Agency, which has a copy of the records.
Education specialists in the Kingdom have indicated that Saudi Arabia opened the first cultural office in America on Aug. 7, 1956, which was called the Saudi Cultural Office in New York. This period saw the number of Saudi students on scholarships to the United States double to 800 by 1974. A year later there were 2,039 scholarship students studying at American institutions.
Then the Kingdom’s Cabinet passed a resolution to establish eight branches of the Saudi educational office in the United States, each one providing educational, social and financial support for students and their families on scholarships.
The year 1980 was a watershed time in the history of the Saudi scholarship program with a record 11,000 students admitted to learning institutions in America. In a remarkable development, expressing the wisdom of the Kingdom’s rulers, women made up a third of this number, according to the education office in Houston, Texas.
In 1988, the Kingdom opened up the Saudi cultural mission in Washington. This was a particularly fruitful time with 5,436 students graduating in the four years that followed, including 519 with doctoral degrees. 
The year 2005 marked an important turning point in the history of relations between the Kingdom and the United States, with the scholarship program announced with new measures to overcome various challenges facing students. 
The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Foreign Scholarship Program, which had begun in the United States now saw Saudi students studying at several universities across the globe, thus fulfilling the vision outlined by King Abdul Aziz those many years before.
Mohammed bin Abdullah Al-Isa, the Saudi cultural attaché in the United States, said that according to statistics in 2015, there are 125,513 male and female students on scholarships. The breakdown is 57,303 male students and 17,902 female students, with the rest companions, and 9,504 studying at their own expense.
This year, 10,491 male and female candidates have been nominated for the eighth scholarship program, the highest number in the history of the Kingdom. There are 627 doctoral degree candidates, 1,397 for medical degrees, 6,741 for master’s degrees, and 1,726 for bachelor’s degrees in the medical field.