Adnan bin Abdulaziz Al-Ahmadi

External Scholarships.. Gateway to Knowledge Investment

24 July 2026 - 00:00 | Last update 24 July 2026 - 00:00

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External scholarships are one of the Kingdom's most important long-term investments, a strategic tool for building national knowledge capital and transferring expertise from global universities and research labs. Over decades, Saudi scholarship recipients have proven their competence in highly competitive academic and research environments, securing advanced positions in prestigious international institutions.

However, the cumulative impact of this massive investment remains - in some aspects - below the potential of this national wealth. The reason is often not the scholarship recipient, but a system that still treats him in multiple stages as an administrative file, rather than as a knowledge investment capable of development and maximization. The most important question is not where the scholarship was taken, nor how many scholarship recipients there were, but rather how much knowledge, partnerships, added value, and national impact this investment has achieved.

One cannot speak about Saudi scholarships without referring to successful national experiences, foremost the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Scholarship Program and its subsequent extensions, which produced tens of thousands of competencies and established a generation of specialists directly linked to the labor market. However, employment success - important as it is - represents only one part of the hoped-for return. The greatest benefit from the scholarship recipient does not end when he gets a job; rather, it begins when his knowledge, partnerships, and research are employed in building an integrated national knowledge system. This deeper benefit remains - in many cases - limited, and this is clearly evident in university and academic scholarships, where the primary goal is supposed to be research and institutional impact.

So where does the value of scholarships leak? Perhaps what I have touched upon from various experiences clarifies the following:

The gap begins from the moment of choosing the destination. The burden of research and selection often falls almost entirely on the scholarship recipient, without a precise institutional study linking the university, lab, and supervisor to national priorities and the actual needed specializations. Ideally, the scholarship decision should be preceded by a strategic study identifying the optimal destinations according to the home university's outputs and needs, not merely specifying the highest-ranked universities. The highest-ranked university is not necessarily the most beneficial destination for every specialization, and the strongest global lab alone does not guarantee the highest national return. Real value begins when the destination matches the need.

Then comes the scholarship phase, where internal supervision (if any) in many cases remains closer to administrative follow-up than to academic partnership. In fact, the scholarship recipient needs a local supervisor who is a partner, not a monitor or inspector; someone who communicates with the external supervisor, tracks the research path, opens doors to the home university and its projects, and ensures that the institutional connection is not severed once the student leaves the Kingdom. Here emerges another opportunity that is not sufficiently exploited. The scholarship recipient is not a lone student at a foreign university; he is a living link between two institutions. Signing institutional agreements with the universities to which our students are sent can open broad horizons for research cooperation and academic exchange, even non-financially binding memoranda of understanding, benefiting both parties for many years.

Perhaps one of the most wasted opportunities is that the scholarship recipient reaches the best research labs, works under the supervision of top scientists, publishes high-ranking research with sustainable impact, without any institutional mechanism to ensure national benefit from this productivity or to transform it into an ongoing partnership between the sending entity and the institutions that hosted the scholarship recipient. At times, the sending entity is not even mentioned as an affiliation in the published outputs. Meanwhile, some local sectors compete to benefit from these scientists through other costly and expensive recruitment projects.

After return, a no less important phase begins. The scholarship recipient returns laden with expertise, skills, and international networks, but he needs an environment that enables him to invest them. What is required is not merely ending the mission and the scholarship recipient returning to his job, but activating his international partnerships, employing his research skills, and providing platforms through which he transfers the knowledge and experiences he has acquired.

Scholarship recipients are more aware of the points of failure and closer to envisioning solutions. Listening to them institutionally makes the reengineering of the scholarship system a participatory effort, not a top-down decision. Also, creating a unified national platform connecting scholarship recipients to their universities, and allowing subsequent recipients to benefit from the experiences of those before them, can transform scattered individual experiences into an institutional knowledge asset.

The picture is not complete without a greater presence of the private sector, as one of the natural beneficiaries of the national competencies trained abroad. Its contribution to identifying future specializations, co-financing, and hosting scholarship recipients after their return remains below available potential. Increasing focus on opening joint scholarships between universities and the private sector in strategic fields transforms the scholarship recipient from a cost on one entity to a shared asset with distributed costs and multiplied returns, creating a permanent knowledge bridge between education and industry.

Reengineering the scholarship system does not necessarily mean increasing the number of scholarship recipients or expanding the list of universities. Rather, it may primarily mean improving what happens before, during, and after the scholarship. Real investment is not measured by the number of those who left to global universities, but by what remains of their impact in Saudi universities, scientific research, the labor market, and the knowledge economy.

External scholarships are a strategic wealth, and to maximize benefit from them and their outputs, it is important for officials of the scholarship system in the Ministry of Education and relevant university bodies to reflect - effectively and urgently - on this wealth, and to move from merely specifying the universities to which scholarships should be sent (sometimes the top fifty, sometimes the top hundred) to engineering an integrated system that measures its inputs, the impact of its outputs, and what lies between them, on the nation present and future.