Market Intelligence Brief: Qatar 2024

Located on the west coast of the Arabian Gulf, Qatar is a small yet highly prosperous country with a population of around 3 million - including a large number of migrant workers, with ‘non-Qataris’ representing around 90 per cent of the country’s total population. While the country is relatively small, Qatar’s outbound mobility ratio stood at 19 per cent in 2021, meaning that the propensity to study abroad of Qatari students is amongst the highest in the world - driven by limited local HE capacity combined with high levels of disposable income and wide availability of scholarship funding for the native Qatari population.

Qatar's development plans aim to diversify the country's economy away from reliance on oil and gas exports, with education playing an important role in this transformation. According to data from UNESCO, primary and secondary level enrolments have almost tripled compared to the levels seen in 2000, while tertiary enrolments have increased by a multiple of more than 5. In addition to local public and private higher education institutions, Qatar also hosts eight international branch campuses of foreign universities, located within Education City.

The UK remains the most popular international study destination for Qatari students, well ahead of the US, Canada and Australia. Undergraduate students make up a large majority of Qatar-domiciled students in the UK, but there was strong growth in the volume of inbound students both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the early 2010s. More recently the total number of inbound students has stabilised at around 3,000 over the last few years, with a drop in the number of Qatari citizens compensated by continued growth in Qatar-domiciled expatriates, who now make up around 40 per cent of the total. Engineering & technology is the most popular broad subject area, followed by Business & management and Computing.

Qatar is also a major host of UK transnational education, with more students enrolled on UK higher education programmes delivered in-country than in the UK. The University of Aberdeen's campus in the country hosts more than 1,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, while several other universities also have large numbers of TNE or distance learning students. Other forms of UK-Qatar cooperation such as joint research cooperation are also seeing growth in line with Qatar's aim to become a knowledge-based economy.

This 24-page report gives an overview of Qatar's education system and the wider demographic, economic and political context, with a focus on international education trends in the country - including both student mobility and transnational education. It aims to provide useful information to UK education institutions and other UK stakeholders considering partnerships with counterparts in Qatar and to support further cooperation and engagement between the two countries.