Zewail University plans to open its doors to the first batch of student next September.

Starting early next week, Zewail University of Science and Technology will start receiving applications from high school students seeking to join the first class at the new university for the autumn 2013 semester.

The deadline for receiving the complete applications – along with all the required supporting documents – is 25^th July 2013.

The minimum requirement will be a score of over 90% for students with either a science or mathematics major in high school. All applicants will then need to take a series of admission exams prepared by the university itself, including English language, before they are accepted.

“We are looking to recruit the best students there are, regardless of social or financial status,” says Sherif Sedky, the founding provost of the university. “For the first year, we will recruit the 300 students who score highest in the admission exams.”

The university will also be taking transfers from other Egyptian universities, but details of this will be announced at a later, unannounced date.

Over the past several months, the university has been receiving several inquiries about tuition fees, since the premium education it is expected to give will probably be unaffordable to the vast majority of Egyptian families, which might make it an elitist institution. Sedky repeatedly stressed that the only criteria for selection will remain merit-based, and that they will offer financial aid for students who cannot afford the tuition fees (which he declined to reveal exactly).

“Eventually, I expect all the students to be on some form of scholarship of varying levels. I don’t think anyone will be paying the full tuition fees and we will study all cases very closely so no smart, good candidates are excluded due to financial issues,” he added.

This has raised questions about how sustainable the project is, however. Since it was first announced, Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail, who is the head of the board of directors of Zewail City, said the project aims to raise an initial endowment of 2 billion EGP (~US$297 million).

But Sedky says they need five times that much to be sustainable without depending on tuition fees. “We are also depending on the science research that will take place in the City. We believe this should be sustainable on its own.”

However, the budding science city – with the tagline of “Egypt’s national project for science renaissance”, has yet to reach its first aim, let alone Sedky’s much more ambitious target.

The campus of Zewail City is still under dispute with Nile University, which had won a court case which allow them access to one of the buildings. However, a final decision on the case is still over a month away. Sedky added that this wait is not stopping the progress as they prepare to host students, by setting up facilities, securing book references and upgrading the registration facilities.

“We need to diffentiate between the building and the Zewail City project. The project is our faculty, researchers and staff. These are all we need to keep this project alive anywhere,” he says.

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Arab states have consistently rated extremely low in TIMSS global math and science test, and the latest results released for 2011 are no exception.

TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is a standardised test for young pupils to measure how good education is in each country. Unfortunately, Arab states remain well below the average mark, a reflection of the poor and aging education systems in most of the countries of the region.

While Qatari and Emirati students have made some good progress, most of the other countries remain stagnant, making the end of the list. In fact, in fourth-grade math, the 10 lowest-performing states were all Arab ones (keeping in mind that there are only 10 Arab states on the test in the first place.)

In a feature published earlier this month in Gulf News,  Nidhal Guessoum, associate dean at the American University of Sharjah, UAE, argues for the need to update the science and mathematics curricula of Arab states – and to do that these countries will need to look East, rather than the tradition approach of looking West. Singapore, which has consistently scored very highly in TIMSS, may be the best option to look at. Even the US is currently studying the educational system there to overhaul its own, under-performing system.

Education in many of the Arab states relies on rote learning and memorization of as much information as possible. Turning to the Singaporean example, Guessoum suggests a shift to focusing on fewer topics, but exploring those extensively and in various ways through experiments, hands-on approaches, and graphical representations.

To solve the underlying problems, Guessoum says that “educators need to stress the relevance of science to a host of societal issues, such as the environment, economics, etc.; we also need to re-train the teachers, especially by integrating today’s digital resources; and we need to lighten the curriculum and make it more cross-disciplinary.”

Last week, the US State Department and the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALESCO) launched a new initiative to translate open-access educational material to Arabic and make it available freely across the region, will a focus mainly on science and technology.

In late November 2012, Taghreedat, a major Arabic e-content community initiative, partnered with the open source Khan Academy which produces educational science and technology videos to make them available in Arabic.

Hopefully, these initiatives might be the start of a serious, much needed shift in the educational paradigm in the region. However, they must be coupled with a real change inside the classrooms (and outside) as Guessoum argues in his feature.