Doha Education City: A Model Worth Borrowing?

Many thanks to Bankelele for suggesting that instead of a city, we could model Konza around Doha’s Education City. I’d not heard of the city before, but reading up on it, I like what I see so far.

An initiative of the Qatar Foundation For Education, Science and Community Development, the Doha Education City currently hosts six American universities (including the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University), one Qatari University,3 other colleges and 3 research institutions among others. It also houses Cornell’s New York tech campus, which I believe would be perfect for us.

The education city’s  agenda is to build Qatar’s innovation and technology capacity by developing and commercializing solutions through key sciences. The community development programs aim to help foster a progressive society, while also enhancing the cultural landscape, protecting Qatar’s heritage, and addressing immediate social needs in the community

In 1995, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, then 43, deposed his father in a bloodless coup while he was out of the country. That same year, he launched the Qatar Foundation, a nonprofit organization chaired by one of his three wives, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, with the goal of “supporting Qatar on its journey from carbon economy to knowledge economy by unlocking human potential.”

That plan was laid out in a national strategy called Qatar National Vision 2030, which outlines how the country must transform itself. But is it realistic to believe that Qatar will continue to prosper long after its natural resources are gone? And will establishing an American education beachhead in the Middle East help enhance the image of the United States in the region?…

….The Education City complex has evolved and expanded since Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) became the first American school to open a branch campus in the country in 1998. Now more than 4,000 students, over half of them female, from Qatar and dozens of other countries are working on degrees in medicine from Cornell University, journalism from Northwestern, international relations at Georgetown, design at VCU, engineering at Texas A&M, or business and computer science at Carnegie Mellon — all right in the Education City complex on the outskirts of Doha.(source)

Considering that our local universities aren’t doing much to foster a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation, would a version of the education city work for us?