By Okaz/Saudi Gazette

PARIS — Minister of Education Dr. Hamad Al-Sheikh said that admission to the foreign scholarship program has been restricted to the top 200 universities around the world.

“This is to realize the quality criteria in line with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030,” he said.

The minister made these remarks while inaugurating the online system of services for scholarship students titled “Safeer2” at the cultural attaché’s office in the Saudi embassy in Paris on Wednesday.

Saudi Ambassador to France Dr. Khalid Al-Anqari, Saudi Permanent Representative to UNESCO Dr. Ibrahim Al-Balawi, Saudi Cultural Attaché Dr. Abdullah Al-Thunayyan, Military Attaché in France Col. Ibrahim Al-Mutawa, and a number of officials and Saudi scholarship students in France attended the ceremony.

Al-Sheikh said that the governance of the scholarship and raising the quality of its output were the priorities of the ministry, through reviewing controls and mechanisms of scholarship operations, in addition to the development of all procedures and policies to follow up the scholarship students and those accompanying them.

“The ministry is also keen on reducing the burden pertaining to human resources, administration and finance on cultural attachés, as well as on raising the efficiency of supervisors of students through provision of training about the regulations of the country to which they were sent for higher studies besides doing follow-up and evaluation of their performance and submit periodic reports.

The minister said that the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’ Scholarship Program is one of the most important manpower development programs in the Kingdom, and it is a promising ground for the advancement toward future by investing in human capital and qualifying it in the finest specialized international universities in various branches of science and knowledge.

Al-Sheikh pointed out that the Ministry of Education has worked during the past months to develop the foreign scholarship program on various levels, and that resulted in launching several quality initiatives.

The most important of these initiatives are linking the program’s output with the requirements and needs of the labor market through the conclusion of agreements with international companies based in the scholarship countries to train and qualify scholarships students; providing vocational guidance and courses for job qualification for graduates, and creating a direct channel of communication between employers and the scholarship graduates.

“The ministry’s decision to restrict admission to top 200 world universities is to strengthen this in its bid to realize the quality criteria, in line with the Vision 2030,” he added.