Over the 1990s decade, Saudi Arabia sent roughly 5,000 students per year to learn in the United States. After the terror attacks of 9/11/01 in which Saudis killed almost 3,000 people in the U.S., the number of Saudi students declined.

For a while.

In 2003, as the American War on Terror raged in mostly Muslim countries, the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program was launched. The goal was to bring “High school students from countries with significant Muslim populations [to] live and study in the United States for an academic year through the U.S.”

In the 2005/6 academic year, the program hit stride and really began to focus on Saudi Arabia, and reversed the trends of declining Saudi students in the U.S. The number of students grew from just over 3,000 in the 2004/5 academic year to over 61,000 in 2015/6. That high figure represents 0.2% of the entire population of Saudi Arabia to a single country. By way of comparison, the ENTIRE American students abroad cohort all over the world is around 162,000, or 0.05% of the U.S. population.

The whopping Saudi figures of 2014/5 and 2015/6 began to decline with the terrorist attacks in Europe including the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket attacks of January 2015. Around that time, Saudi Arabian spies were also caught stealing private user information from Twitter to enable the government to crack down on users posting negative things about the monarchy.

Under the Trump administration, for all of the comments that President Trump cozied to the Saudis, the declining trend continued, which did not get any pushback from liberals who were incensed by the killing and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamaal Khashoggi.

For the 2021/22 academic year, China and India were the countries with the largest cohort of students learning in the U.S., as Saudi Arabia dropped to number 7, “primarily due to changes in its government’s scholarship program.” COVID disrupted the program significantly in the following years. In 2021/22, China accounted for 31% and India 21% of all international students.

The human rights abuses in China, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria continue, and the U.S. continues to bring in their students, perhaps in an effort to build bridges to a more tolerant future.

In 2022, Saudi Arabia executed 196 people, the highest record in a single year recorded by Amnesty International. The trend has continued in 2023, including the July 2023 death sentence handed to Mohammad al-Ghamdi, who tweeted negative things about the government.

The United States is once again trying to build bridges to the powerful, rich and morally-defective Saudi kingdom. Fruits of that effort may be found throughout America’s college campuses.

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