covering veil favored by Saudi women, Maha Mazyad looked through leaflets for prospective jobs with some of the Kingdom's largest companies at a recent career fair in Riyadh. A few years ago she would have worried about the disapproving reaction of friends and parents to the notion of a young woman working in an office without family supervision, but a stint at a UK university has propelled her to seek a career. “Now lots of girls go abroad to study and broaden their horizons. There's been a big change in attitudes among my girlfriends over about the last three years,” said Mazyad, 27, from Madinah, clutching a flamingo-pink handbag stuffed with job fliers. Mazyad's own way of thinking shifted after she took part in a scholarship program sponsored and paid for by Saudi Arabia that has sent hundreds of thousands of young people overseas in the past seven years. Mody Al-Khalaf, director of social and cultural affairs at the Saudi Cultural Mission in Washington, told a 2010 conference that scholarship students were not just studying, but learning about the societies of their host countries and “breaking stereotypes and building bridges.” King Abdullah wanted young Saudis “to know the world and for the world to know them”, she said. What has really made a difference, analysts and program participants say, is that the scholarships have been awarded not only to the privately educated elite of large cities but also to bright young people from poorer, smaller towns. Scholarship winners studying at colleges across the United States now form the third-largest group of foreign students, after Chinese and Indians, at universities like Kansas State. They are also getting attention: when Saudi women at Marshall University in rural Huntington, West Virginia, held a session explaining why they wore headscarves, the first meeting was so crowded the organizers had to arrange repeats. Later, Muslim students staged a dormitory skit about reaction to their coverings. “It's been really enriching for our students to be exposed to that kind of diversity,” said Clark Egnor, executive director of the university's Center for International Programs. “Most of our (American) students are first-generation college students, and meeting students from other countries is an important part of their education. It helps prepare them for the world they're going to live and work in.”
