American University of Iraq, Sulaimani: New Way of Teaching in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Kyle Long, Director of Communications at American University of Iraq, Sulaimani
There’s a longer history of private education in other parts of Iraq in the south, particularly in Baghdad, but in the Kurdistan region this is something of a novelty. There are about a dozen or more private universities in the Kurdistan region. The American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, was founded in 2007. The university is the only private not-for-profit university in the Kurdistan region (and Iraq, too).

Interview with Kyle Long, Director of Communications at American University of Iraq, Sulaimani

Kyle Long, Director of Communications at American University of Iraq, Sulaimani

Tell us about the private sector education in Kurdistan. It’s something new and has never been done before. We come from a socialist regime and now it’s turning into a market economy. Can you give us the general picture about the private education system in the Kurdistan region?

As you pointed out, private education is sort of a newer phenomenon in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. There’s a longer history of private education in other parts of Iraq in the south, particularly in Baghdad, but in the Kurdistan region this is something of a novelty. There are about a dozen or more private universities in the Kurdistan region. Our university, the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, was founded in 2007. We’re only now in our sixth year of operation. We graduated our first class of students last June with 37 undergraduates and 37 graduates from our Executive MBA program.

Private higher education in the Kurdistan region is still trying to find its footing. My university is the only private not-for-profit university in the Kurdistan region, or actually in all of Iraq. So aside from our American characteristics which set us apart, the American University of Iraq in Sulaymaniyah is also set apart because it is a not-for-profit organization.

The other private universities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq are for-profit. They have boards of directors that receive profits. I like to say that at AUIS, the only people who profit are our students because all monies received are re-invested back into the operation. This helps pay for faculty salaries and building projects like the beautiful building we are sitting in right now. This has been a difficult feature or characteristic of our institution for many in the area to understand and for how to deal with in legal and regulatory matters because we are sort of a square block that doesn’t quite fit into their circle hole. We have good relationships with the Ministry of Higher Education and with the KRG at large but there are still some operational matters that need sorting out.American University of Iraq, Sulaimani

As you pointed out in your introduction to the question, the Kurdistan region of Iraq is moving from a socialist society to one that is much more market-oriented. So what we are trying to do at this university is provide an alternative to the standard university which does emphasize a sort of rote learning, a memorize then repeat kind of learning, a learning that understands itself as something that is put into somebody instead of something that is drawn out of somebody. So this requires us to do some different things. This requires us to issue and to offer a pedagogy that really centers on students. We are a student-centered university whereas I think many of the other universities in the region are probably teaching-centered.

The difference that I’m trying to draw out is that we care very deeply about students at the individual level; that’s why we have small classes. Our student-teacher ratio is 16 to 1 and we don’t have any classes that I am aware of that have more than 35 students. So these are very small classes. We have classes that focus routinely on assessment throughout the course of the semester. So whereas many of the university classes throughout the region have lectures and then a big test at the end, our students are assessed throughout the semester with graded homework and exams and group work and assignments that ask them to write papers throughout the course of the semester and think very critically about their own performance as they go on. So that’s the sort of thing that we’re hoping to do.

The American University of Beirut was founded in 1866… They’re our inspiration; they’re our aspiration, as is the American University of Cairo and the American University of Sharjah. AUIS was founded by some very forward-thinking Iraqis who wanted to emulate the successes of those universities. We want to be a regional model…

We don’t ever think we will, and we don’t want to, educate the majority of the students in the Kurdistan region. That’s not what we’re here to do. We don’t think we will ever be more than 2,500 students. We are just below 1,000 now. But what we do hope to do is provide an alternative, provide a model, and provide a new way of thinking about teaching and learning in the region. I think that’s the value that a lot of the private universities in the region have to offer to the people of the Kurdistan region; an alternative way of thinking about things. To this point, we’ve been fortunate enough to deal with good people at the Ministry of Higher Education and from representatives at other public universities whom I do not intend to short-change at all. There are very bright people working over there but those folks, by and large, have not been exposed to an American-style education and that’s really what we hope to do.

Who would you consider your main competition? Is the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani the largest private university at the moment?

I’m not sure. It depends on how you count or who is actually considered a private university. I think most people in the region would probably say that is the University of Kurdistan Hawler, which is a public independent university. They are in their own category. There are public universities like Salahaddin University and Sulaimani University, and then there are private universities like AUIS, Cihan University, SABIS and Ishik.

But then there’s this third category – public independent – and that means that UKH, the University of Kurdistan Hawler, has public money. Students don’t pay a fee to attend the university. But they are operationally independent and their academic structure is different from the other universities. AUIS APP soccer tournament 2013They’re not subject to the guidelines of the ministry that govern the other public universities. The University of Kurdistan Hawler is a British-inspired university. It’s an all-English-language institution like AUIS. They have a three year bachelor degree. I would say that they are probably a competitor of ours insofar as they are the only other all-English-language instruction university in the Kurdistan region.

I would also say that another competitor of ours is Sulaimani University. We actually probably compete with Sulaimani University for students more than we do with UKH simply because we are located in the same city. At this point in Kurdistan’s development, there’s not really a culture of traveling outside of your city to get a university education. Only one-third of our students live in our on-campus residence halls. That means that only one-third of our students come from outside of the Sulaymaniyah Governorate.

Isn’t it an issue that most people who are from good families usually seek education abroad, and this is your main competition?

In my experience, yes. If you’re from a very well-to-do family in Sulaymaniyah and you score well on the baccalaureate exam, you’re a bright student who wants to try something new, take some risks and challenge yourself, we would love to have that kind of student. That student is also likely to attend the American University of Beirut and not AUIS. The American University of Beirut was founded in 1866. They’ve got a century and a half ahead of us. They’re our inspiration; they’re our aspiration, as is the American University of Cairo and the American University of Sharjah. AUIS was founded by some very forward-thinking Iraqis who wanted to emulate the successes of those universities. We want to be a regional model but again, like I said, we are only six years old so we need a little bit more time but I think we’re getting to that point.

What is your ratio of female versus male students?

Right now it’s probably about 60 percent men and 40 percent women. At the public universities in Sulaymaniyah and throughout the Kurdistan region, women actually are probably about 52 percent of the population. programs at American University of Iraq, Sulaimani AUISSo there’s a gap that we need to close. There are a number of different ways to account for why our gender ratio is a bit different from the public universities. One interpretation is that because we charge a fee, a lot of families, if they can only send one of their children for private education for a fee, they are going to send their son and not their daughter. So our recruitment strategy actively seeks out ways to engage more women students.

What about your programs? How many programs do you currently have in undergraduate and graduate studies?

We have one graduate program which is our Executive MBA program. We offer a joint Executive MBA with a German university, Steinbeis-Hochschule in Berlin. Their faculty come down here and administer the courses. That’s our only graduate program at this time. Most of our resources are focused on becoming a premier undergraduate college. We want to be the university of choice for Iraq and so we are devoting as many resources as possible into building our undergraduate programs. These are in Business Administration, General Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, Information Technology, International Studies, and English Journalism.

We are keen on developing international institutional partnerships to support these programs and we are looking to grow and add more programs as we mature. But we can’t just start throwing new degree programs together at the drop of a hat. These are things that need to be cultivated and paid attention to. We have a partnership with the University of Colorado, Boulder to design and implement our engineering program. We have a partnership with Stanford University in the United States to develop a legal studies program. We have a partnership with the University of California, AUIS meets Bill ClintonLos Angeles in the United States to establish a center for expertise in teaching and learning here at AUIS. Then we have various other partnerships, such as with the University of Amsterdam for a student exchange program where they send some of their students here for a ten-day period and we send some of our students there. So we have a lot of programs like these.

In March 2013, we’re also starting a new research center called the Institute of Regional and International Studies which will have a number of functions, the first of which will be an annual conference called the Sulaimani Forum. This will convene both policy-makers and policy-implementers, academics and politicians. The idea is that because we are strategically located in the Kurdistan region and specifically in Sulaymaniyah, we can get people in the room who don’t often speak to each other and who should, like Iranians and Israelis, Turks and Arabs, and Kurds and Arabs. We think that our university, which because of our American characteristics to advance, support and encourage dialogue, can be a convening place for these sorts of conversations. We are looking for institutional partners there as well. We have a number of them on the docket that aren’t necessarily secure yet but we are hoping that this initial conference will push this forward.

The research institute itself will also convene some quarterly meetings throughout the year that emerge from the topics of the first Sulaimani Forum which will be “The Changing Geopolitics of the Middle East Two Years after the Arab Spring.” There will be opportunities for our own faculty to earn some reduced teaching loads to do some research and to have some scholars in residence who can only do the sorts of research that they want to do and do well if they have a good place for it in Iraq, specifically in Kurdistan or in Sulaymaniyah. Then there will be a publication function as well where we get to share all of that good work.

What is the major challenge that the university is facing? Is it finances? Faculty? Most of the universities in the Kurdistan region complain that they can only attract professors for one or two years then they leave because there are not enough academic opportunities for them.Professional development institute at American University of Iraq, Sulaimani AUIS

Yes, many of us have the same challenges. I would say that both faculty recruitment and student recruitment to a certain extent, and finances, are issues. With the first one, faculty requirement, it is difficult to convince faculty, and our faculty are predominantly Americans, to come to Iraq. We are the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. We are not the American University of Kurdistan, Sulaimani because we aspire to be a national university. We want a student body that reflects the country of Iraq and not the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. We are very thankful and appreciative that we are located in the Kurdistan region but we want to be a national university. That means that Iraq will stay in the name of the university. That means when we’re marketing ourselves to potential faculty members in the United States, we have to sell Iraq, and that’s difficult.

It’s difficult to convince people who have never been to Iraq or who have never heard of the Kurdistan region to come out here. So yes, faculty recruitment is difficult. It also forces us to be very creative. Necessity is the mother of invention so we are going to have to be creative not only in our marketing but in the way we deliver our academic programs as well. We are young enough right now to be flexible and we are not set in our ways. So we have the luxury of re-thinking traditional modes of academic program delivery which means we can explore opportunities to bring faculty out here for maybe two weeks and then do some distance learning with them throughout the course of the semester, and then bring them back using technology. So I think we are bound to succeed if we think outside the box a little bit, which we are. I’m confident that we can go forward with that but yes, recruitment does remain a challenge unless we think creatively about it.

In student recruitment, as I mentioned, we are doing well and we are growing. We’re growing faster than we thought we would grow. But as we’ve also talked about in this conversation already, the best students, the students who score the best on their baccalaureate exams or the students who come from the most cosmopolitan families, are going to be going abroad for their education. We want to be the alternative to that and we want to bring the world to them. But these best students tend to enroll in the medical and engineering faculties. Not at any point soon are we going to have a college of medicine. That would take many more resources than we have and it would just be too soon. I can imagine the university having a medical college, maybe in ten years, but not now. We might have a degree program in public health. That could be possible a lot sooner. In fact, we’re having conversations with the State University of New York in Albany to think about a public health program.students at AUIS American University of Iraq, Sulaimani

The best students in the Kurdistan region, and you might have already interviewed a number of these people, are civil engineers. This is somewhat strange coming from an American background where civil engineers are the lowest of the engineering caste. Here they are the most highly-regarded. We do not have a civil engineering program. We do that on purpose because we think there are already too many civil engineers in the region and so we offer a degree program in general engineering and mechanical engineering. The general engineering program is unique because it does not exist in Iraq. We are the only university to offer it. Cambridge has it, MIT has it, University of Colorado, Boulder has it, and a lot of other places have it, but not here. So that has been a tough sell as well but our brand is developing and we are doing considerably better with student recruitment in the past two years than we did in the first two years which makes a lot of sense.

Now finances, yes, any young institution like ours is going to have to find new and diverse ways to keep the place afloat and find alternative revenue streams. We are a not-for-profit organization as I mentioned before, but we do have a program at the institution, a professional development institute that offers continuing education courses for working professionals. That provides one revenue stream. We do English language classes, business English classes, project management classes, and our MBA is offered through that wing of the institution. There are opportunities for us to grow there as well, to secure some contracts with the oil and gas industry, to provide some professional development opportunities, especially for their local staff. As we grow, we are trying to find ways to support the institution. When the university was founded, I think that our original board members and our leadership team probably thought that there would be a lot more money from the American government. We’ve been fortunate enough to receive somewhere in the range of  US $12.5 million from the United States government but that’s really a drop in the bucket.

Can you talk about projects and expansion on the campus?

What we are looking at right now is somewhere between US $225 and 250 million for the construction alone. As I said, we need to expand and I don’t have figures for how much that is going to cost but this is all Jerusalem marble here. This is expensive. It’s beautiful but you’ve got to pay for it too and so the next phase of building will probably be not as grand but probably much more functional.

But you don’t have the numbers on how much the expansion is worth?

We don’t have the next phase in place yet. If past history is any indication, I can imagine somewhere between US $50 and 75 million will need to be put into the next phase, if not more. The good news is that we have a lot of resources. If you look out the window here, all the way to that fence where those trucks are moving is our land. All the way to the airport is our land. We have 418 acres of land. So this is a very lucrative resource for us and there are lots of things we can do with it, so we need to be smart about it. There will probably be some decisions made in the not-too-distant future about how to leverage that.

In terms of the growth of the university, do you have any numbers?

We are just below 900 students in our undergraduate program. Our undergraduate program includes those students who are currently in degree programs and who are in our academic preparatory program which is our one-year intensive English language program. All of our classes are in English but 90 percent of our admitted students need remedial English language education before they are at a level that would suffice for the standard of English that we need to be a regionally-accredited institution in the United States. Depending on a student’s English aptitude, they get placed into one of four levels in the academic preparatory program. There are currently just short of 400 students in the academic preparatory program and the other 500 are in the undergraduate program proper.

We also have 250 students living on campus right now, taking English language classes through our professional development institute. These are students who are already college graduates from one of the public universities in the Kurdistan region and are doing their English language training here before they go and study for a Masters or PhD in the United States. They are all recipients of the KRG’s Human Capacity Development program. So that brings our student body total to roughly 1,100 students. As I mentioned earlier, we would like to grow to about 2,000 or 2,500 total students and then cap it forever, so we become a very selective institution. Now that could change over time, depending on what the leadership of the institution thinks that we have to offer for the region. But the current plan calls for us to stay a small student-centered university.

Lastly, do you have some statistics for the following; how many students are there in Kurdistan?

We can probably work our way to a rough estimate. Sulaymaniyah University has 20,000 students, Salahaddin has 25,000 students. There are a couple of medical colleges and a science and technology institutions. I’d say we are probably just shy of 100,000 students in Kurdistan. And out of that number we have about 1,000. If you look at any country, the private universities don’t educate nearly the percentage that public universities do, by design, because we exist as an alternative. We exist to do some things that the public universities can’t or won’t do. Like I said, we don’t have any illusions to educating a majority or even a much more sizeable percentage of the student population. What we hope to do is just do it better than anybody else.

Do you know how many public universities versus private universities there are?

There are significantly more public institutions but I don’t know what the ratio is. Maybe three to one.

Do you think the demand for a university education is higher than what the state can provide at the moment?

Yes, there’s a very serious capacity problem. I don’t know how much you know about how students are selected. Students here are “placed” into universities. Something happens each fall called the Zanko Line. Zanko is the Kurdish word for university. The Zanko Line happens around every October and they never tell you when it’s going to happen. The Zanko Line is a list that is published and it tells students based on their national baccalaureate exam score, which is the test that each high school graduate takes at the end of his or her studies, what college they’ve been placed into.

So if you scored well enough and you get placed into the medical college, you’re likely going. If you get placed into the college of agriculture, then you either go into the college of agriculture or you come to AUIS. There is very little choice involved. I don’t want to make any accusations, but there are widely-held rumors that certain patronage networks can get you moved around a little bit to a different college of your choice if you didn’t quite get the one you want. I can neither confirm nor deny those rumors but there’s very little choice. So what AUIS does is offer choice. Students are still bound by certain ministry regulations when they attend our university. You must have a minimum baccalaureate score to become an engineer here but you can also become an international studies major or a business major. That can’t happen elsewhere.

In terms of the applications, do you know the statistics on how many applications there are and how many positions exist?

That is a good question but I’m not in a position to answer that question. Each year, the cutoff for the medical college rises or drops depending on how many graduates, spaces, faculty, buildings and classrooms they have available. That’s why I think the ministry has been considering and opening up some doors for private universities to help with the capacity problems. I imagine that the ministry feels that way about us. They would probably like us to be a lot bigger than we are so that we can help with the capacity issue but at this point in our growth and development, we are nearing the top of the line right now. We’ve got faculty doubled up in offices and we want to keep the classes small for pedagogical and mission-driven reasons. We could probably fit some more students in the classrooms but then what are we sacrificing as well? We want to be able to achieve our mission. Our mission isn’t to just take students. Our mission is to educate students and so we need to be able to do certain things for that.

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