This past Saturday night I returned from having spent 7 days in a country I've fallen in love with now 3 times over - Morocco. Each time I've gained a different perspective of the place and each time that makes me love it more. The first two times I was there I spent most of my time up in the mountains - the 1st discovering it for myself for the first time and the 2nd sharing what I had loved so much with a group of students from my university. This last time, however, was a very different sort of trip. The Office of Admissions at Carnegie Mellon had decided in conjunction with the other universities in Education City to do a recruitment trip to Morocco but unfortunately couldn't pull anybody away from the office to go on it... well unfortunate for them. Apparently I was the next best option.
Of course the timing of this wasn't great. I was in Dubai over the first weekend of December flew back to Doha late Saturday evening, just in time to give me a 2.5 hour layover, enough to allow me to meet my father out in the parking lot, give him my disgusting rugby kit bag and exchange it for my pre-packed bag for Morocco and go back through security to get on my 1am flight to Casablanca. I only ever fly business when the university requires me to (any flight over 8 hours requires you to fly business) but boy was I happy that was the case for this one. We spent 3 days in Rabat, 1 day in Casablanca, and 3 days in Marrakech. I've never done recruitment trips, or any form of admissions work for that matter, with CMUQ but my understanding is that this was NOT a normal trip for many reasons.
One of those reasons is that English was most certainly NOT the primary language of communication. I'd say we spent maybe 30-40% of the time speaking in English. The rest was split between French and Arabic. Second languages were not a pre-requisite for going on this trip but I sure was glad I had at least a functional capacity of French. Most of our meetings with the governmental education bodies were in French and the majority of our meetings with counselors in Rabat were also in French, mostly due to the fact that we were recruiting at French bacalaureat schools. I'm not confident enough to be able to fully express myself in French, but I could understand pretty much everything people were saying. One of my conversations with a counselor was particularly interesting. She had a similar problem to mine, where she didn't feel comfortable expressing herself in English but was completely comprehensive of what I was saying in English. Simple solution - she spoke French to me and I spoke English back to her. It worked beautifully - we had a completely comprehensible conversation for about an hour about educational issues in Morocco and about our travels in France. The frustrating language situations were where the counselors only spoke Arabic. Since my Arabic is quite limited (I'm learning!), these meetings/presentations usually took twice as long because several of us had to be translated.
You might ask why we are recruiting at schools where people don't speak English well if we're admitting them to schools whose ONLY language of instruction is English... I had to ask myself this question as well. The fact is, the parents and school counselors of these students don't speak very good English because they were raised at a time in Morocco's history when the country was following suit with pretty much everything France was doing - including education which meant that they were educated in the French language, not English. The English of the prospective students was significantly better than that of their elders. Some students were more proficient than others but they also have at least a year if not 2 to improve it such that they would be admissible to CMUQ based on TOEFL scores. And just because they don't speak English well doesn't mean that they're any less bright or capable. So... why not recruit them?
The greatest barrier isn't actually language, but rather financial aid for many of these students. They're coming from a country whose annual family income is significantly lower than most of the countries in the gulf. Several of the schools that we presented at were quite wealthy, even having members of the royal family attending. But there were also other schools, what would be considered inner-city public schools in the US, whose technological capabilities/opportunities were small if not non-existent and whose classrooms were quite austere, consisting of little more than some old tables and chairs and a chalk-board at the front of the room. You'd expect these schools to have less capable students based on the model of education in the US, but that was absolutely not the case. The English of the students at these public schools was just as good as any other student.
What does that mean for the responsibility of Education City? It certainly does raise some interesting questions about their target audience for students populations and their ability to provide funding to these students. If QF truly wants to be a center for education in the Middle East, they'll need to work through some of the issues of funding all students that they've encountered over the past couple of years since I've been there. What's certain is that there are plenty of high school students out there in every country across this region of the world that are fully capable of succeeding in our universities at Education City. The question is how to afford them the opportunity of benefiting from it.
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