ABSTRACT
While developing countries spend billions of dollars on sending their people overseas to pursue further qualifications, developed countries have been constantly expanding their service industries to secure finance for their own higher education (HE) programmes. Within this framework, the US has been regarded as the most attractive destination for thousands of international students (Kim, 2012), including Saudis. There are now millions of international students studying at US universities, and Saudi Arabia has been ranked fourth in the list of countries sending their people to the US. This has contributed over $32.8 billion to US economy, according to a 2016 report released by the Association of International Educators. Through an analysis of the King Abdullah Scholarship Programme, together with an analysis of the educational experiences of five Saudi graduate students at different American universities, this chapter examines the following questions: (1) How and in what ways has the global hegemony of US universities penetrated the intellectual and policy infrastructures of Saudi higher education landscape? and (2) What intellectual effect does ‘US university hegemony’ have on Saudi students? The findings reveal that a series of power relations centred on the ‘global-imaginary’ (Lightfoot, 2014), a Western-only mentality, the internal contradictions and tensions inherent in the Saudi HE system, including that of “globalization is equated with secularization, which means the separation of religion and life, replacing Islam with pragmatic and materialist European and American thoughts” (p. 88), together with other complex views created by Saudis, have led to the everyday “embodiment of the global hegemony” (Kim, 2012) enjoyed by American HE bodies.
