The Dean's message

Community Colleges stand for a special type of higher education that has been recently prevailing in the developed world especially in the United States and some European countries. The main goal of these colleges lies in providing higher education programs in the geographical areas where there are no universities in the vicinity that can meet the socially cherished education purpose, as well as those areas where there are no sufficient numbers of students that require the establishment of independent universities.

Like other sister colleges at King Saud University, community college in Riyadh achieves its educational and enlightening message in accordance with the goals of the university in particular and the systems of higher education in the Kingdom in general. Besides, community colleges have unique educational characteristics generated by virtue of the unique nature of their objectives. They have been established to meet the professional needs of the Saudi society, satisfy its quest for knowledge, enable it to keep abreast with the technological and professional development, and provide it with the cadres qualified for achieving saudization.

The dire need to community colleges has been recently necessitated due to the fact that they represent an ideal formula to deal optimally with the potential educational phenomena whether they are purely educational or relevant to other social phenomena. It is quite evident that the Saudi universities have witnessed in recent years a big number of new phenomena topped by the big number of students interested to join the university compared to its actual capacity, which resulted in a remarkable drop in admission rates. Hence, this college came to alleviate the university pressure in this respect. Moreover, it stands as an educational compromise to face the consequences of the student drop-out with all its causes and variables.

To conclude, it goes without saying that community colleges can provide successful qualitative solutions for negative employment phenomena- such as the reliance on foreign labor force- which are due to the relatively long period spent in higher education. The most outstanding achievement of community colleges in terms of social development is to provide the society with qualified human resource able to act as a linking ring between the higher education outputs on the one hand and the vocational education outputs on the other hand.

Prof. Saad M. AlShehri

Dean, Community College in Riyadh