KEY POINTS:
Waikato University is up against top American tertiary institutions in what could be a lucrative bid to help Saudi Arabia reform its tertiary sector.
A university delegation of mainly senior deans leaves today for the oil-rich Middle Eastern state and will be hosted by King Abdallah bin Abd
al-Aziz Al Saud's family in the Ha'il region.
The vice-chancellor, Professor Roy Crawford, said a new university was planned and the kingdom was looking for international help to set it up. Waikato had been invited as a potential partner in the set-up, as had other institutions such as Cornell, Berkeley and Stanford universities in the US.
That meant selling Waikato University's intellectual property in how to create an institution.
Professor Crawford wouldn't specify a value for that knowledge, but said it did have the potential to be a multimillion-dollar deal.
"Oh yes. You'd be talking about large sums. Certainly at the moment, commercially, the Saudis are prepared to invest in order to achieve what they want to achieve."
During the week-long visit staff would be pitching the university's strengths - the recent strategic direction review and Waikato's attention to individual students were both points of differences.
Professor Crawford said joining high- calibre universities with big reputations in the pool was due recognition of hard work over the past few years that had seen the university benchmark its performance against larger schools. It's not certain when a final decision is due or if more institutions are involved in the process.
International education is a $2 billion export earner and although Saudi Arabia as a market is small - about 2000 people studied here last year - industry body Education New Zealand said it was growing in importance.
Over the past few years Waikato has built a steady relationship with Saudi Arabia and this year the university hosted Abdul Kareem, an emissary from the royal house, who was here for eight weeks.
King Abdallah is a strong advocate of tertiary education and funds 25,000 Saudi students around the world - 80 of those study courtesy of his scholarship programme at Waikato, and another 180 study under different schemes.
Professor Crawford said the university was not looking to build satellite campuses, but selling our universities globally was the next logical step for the tertiary sector.