Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
08ISTANBUL466
2008-08-27 13:45:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Consulate Istanbul
Cable title:  

IRAN'S "BRAIN DRAIN": A SNAPSHOT FROM SHARIF

Tags:  PGOV PREL PHUM IR TU 
pdf how-to read a cable
VZCZCXRO9646
PP RUEHBC RUEHDE RUEHDIR RUEHKUK
DE RUEHIT #0466/01 2401345
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
P 271345Z AUG 08
FM AMCONSUL ISTANBUL
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 8427
INFO RUCNIRA/IRAN COLLECTIVE PRIORITY
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 ISTANBUL 000466 

SIPDIS

LONDON FOR GAYLE; BAKU FOR HORNER AND MCCRENSKY; BERLIN FOR
PAETZOLD; ASHGEBAT FOR TANGBORN; DUBAI FOR IRPO

E.O. 12958: DECL: 08/27/2009
TAGS: PGOV PREL PHUM IR TU
SUBJECT: IRAN'S "BRAIN DRAIN": A SNAPSHOT FROM SHARIF
UNIVERSITY

REF: BAKU 773

Classified By: Acting Principal Officer Sandra Oudkirk; Reason 1.5 (d)

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 ISTANBUL 000466

SIPDIS

LONDON FOR GAYLE; BAKU FOR HORNER AND MCCRENSKY; BERLIN FOR
PAETZOLD; ASHGEBAT FOR TANGBORN; DUBAI FOR IRPO

E.O. 12958: DECL: 08/27/2009
TAGS: PGOV PREL PHUM IR TU
SUBJECT: IRAN'S "BRAIN DRAIN": A SNAPSHOT FROM SHARIF
UNIVERSITY

REF: BAKU 773

Classified By: Acting Principal Officer Sandra Oudkirk; Reason 1.5 (d)


1. (C) Summary and comment: We spoke recently with several
students from Iran's prestigious Sharif University of
Technology who are headed to the U.S. for graduate/PhD
studies. The students shared their views on Sharif's
academic competitiveness and student body; described their
reliance on the internet and cell phones for
information-gathering and social networking; and
characterized Sharif as a far less political campus than
Tehran and Amir Kabir Universities ("we're too busy
studying"). They assessed that the lack of good jobs and
stable professional futures in Iran combined with the Iranian
regime's indifference towards them (as contrasted with the
interest of top western universities in recruiting them),is
persuading up to 90% of them to seek advanced study abroad,
with little interest in returning to Iran afterwards. We
were struck that so many of Iran's brightest students, when
confronted with the choice of staying in Iran and working to
effect gradual change, or leaving to find a better life
elsewhere, choose the latter. While it remains in the USG's
strong interest to continue to support the desire of students
like these to seek PhD opportunities abroad, it is
unfortunate that so many of Iran's brightest students feel no
stake in trying to effect positive change at home. End
summary and comment.


2. (SBU) Consulate Istanbul's "Iran Watcher" met with
several undergraduate students from Tehran's Sharif
University of Science and Technology over the past two weeks,
to seek their views on why so many Sharif students are
seeking to pursue graduate or doctoral programs abroad and on
conditions facing university students in Iran. These
students had applied for and received U.S. student visas in
Istanbul, and will be attending graduate and/or PhD programs
at Harvard, UCLA, UC Riverside, and University of
Pennsylvania. The students, all of whom had read an August
9, 2008 article in "Newsweek" about Sharif University's

growing worldwide reputation for educating exceptionally
gifted science students, were eager to share their views with
a U.S. diplomat.

A Snapshot from Sharif University
--------------


3. (SBU) "The most competitive program in the world": The
students we spoke with were studying electrical engineering,
chemical engineering, and computer sciences at Sharif. They
all took the university entrance exam (the "konkur") in 2003
or 2004, and all scored within the top 200 out of the 500,000
Iranian students who took it each of those two years.
According to our interlocutors, to get accepted into the
electrical engineering department at Sharif, a student
typically must score within the top 100 of all students
taking the exam; to get into chemical engineering, one must
score in the top 150, and to get into computer sciences, in
the top 200. The computer sciences student, on the basis of
her top 200 score, was also offered a space in Tehran
University's electrical engineering program -- her preferred
field -- but accepted Sharif's offer of a computer sciences
degree instead because of Sharif's reputation. An electrical
engineering student told us that the department head
reinforces to his students at every opportunity that that
program is "the most competitive university engineering
program in the world." According to these students, the
pressure to score well on the konkur is correspondingly
intense, with "konkur preparation classes" becoming a
burgeoning industry in Iran, "like your Kaplan or Princeton
Review courses, except in Iran more than half the companies
offering these classes are just scamming students for money."
They had all taken konkur review courses from reputable
companies, and agreed that students who cannot afford to do
so are at a distinct disadvantage.


4. (SBU) Impressions of the curriculum and workload: The
students found the undergraduate workload heavy but not
impossible, and the quality of the classes heavily dependent
on each professor's own publications, expertise, and academic
connections outside Iran. In the sciences departments, each
student took only a few elective courses throughout their
undergraduate studies, but when they did they made sure to
sign up for courses taught by professors with track records
of publication in western journals, as that tended to
correlate with the professor being more "up to date" and
having more access to western teaching materials. They also
gravitated towards professors with reputations for helping
their students publish. One student took issue with the

ISTANBUL 00000466 002 OF 003


recent "Newsweek" article claim that Iranians had been banned
until only recently from publishing in the prestigious
journals of the "Institute for Electrical and Electronic
Engineers" (IEEE),showing several of her published IEEE
articles from 2006-8. According to an electrical engineering
student, Sharif students publish more scientific articles in
peer review journals, by far, than any other Iranian
university. "This is one of the benefits that Sharif offers,
which makes us appealing to western graduate schools and PhD
programs," he said.


5. (SBU) Sharif's student body and student life: According
to these students, because Sharif was modeled on MIT and
Sharif's overall approach has not been "meddled with" too
drastically by the Iranian government, campus life at Sharif
felt closer to a "western campus experience" than any other
Iranian university could provide. These students were active
members, for example, of extracurricular clubs like mountain
climbing, photography, computer gaming, and music. They
described the student body as weighted demographically
towards Iran's wealthier urbanites, especially from Tehran,
Yazd, Mashhad, and Esfahan, and as primarily ethnic Persian,
though they all noted they had Azeri classmates as well.
There were also a few Iranian-Kurdish and Ahwaz Arab
students, but they tended to keep to themselves. Male and
female students mingled easily, though female students,
according to one, are not allowed the same opportunities as
male students (at Sharif or elsewhere),especially regarding
participation in academic competitions abroad. One female
student was initially denied permission to participate in a
2006 robotics competition in Germany because the university
was not willing to send an official chaperone "to protect her
virtue", but Sharif relented when her family agreed to send
her older sister to go with her, at the family's expense.
"That kind of thing happens all the time,", another female
student agreed, "whether going to a professor's office hours,
or using the computer lab, unless the female students go
together as a group, we find many doors are closed to us."



6. (SBU) Internet and cell-phones: The students told us
they spend considerable time using Sharif's broadband
internet access to surf the web, mostly to track down
scientific research, read news, and keep up with social
networking sites. They felt the effects of Iranian
government internet filtering, which became much more
noticeable in 2005-6, corresponding to the Ahmadinejad
government's periodic crackdowns on civil society and social
freedoms. Even so, one surmised that the Iranian government
imposed fewer restrictions and/or less rigorous filtering of
Sharif students' internet usage than on other Iranian
universities' students. As an example, he said that at the
Sharif computer labs, one can usually access the social
networking site "Facebook", a site that is largely off-limits
to most Iranians (and was inaccessible from Sharif's internet
portals last year). But for more immediate social
networking, all the students we spoke to relied primarily on
cell-phone text messaging, usually sending messages in a
mixture of Farsi and English to avoid triggering Iranian
government electronic text-search monitoring, even for
innocuous conversations.


7. (SBU) "Not a hotbed of student radicalism": The students
downplayed the role that political activism plays in their
daily lives. "Unlike Tehran University or Amir Kabir
University, you can come here and avoid politics if you want
to." They acknowledged that the Iranian Basiji (a pro-regime
paramilitary force that includes students) were present at
Sharif, but generally kept a low profile. They were proud of
the fact that Sharif University, alone among Iran's top
universities, had retained its chancellor, Dr. Saed
Sohrabpour, throughout the Ahmadinejad years ("every other
university has had its chancellor removed by Ahmadinejad and
replaced usually by a cleric lacking in serious academic
credentials", they said). However, they also shared the view
that Dr. Sohrabpour had aligned himself too closely to
Ahmadinejad's government, and that he had not protested
enough when, for example, the governent asked Sharif to
confer honorary degrees on several government officials last
year as a reward for loyalty to Ahmadinejad. Although they
claimed that "100%" of their classmates, "minus the basiji",
were disenchanted with the regime and the Ahmadinejad
government in particular, they also acknowledged that Sharif
was not a hotbed of student activism, as most students are
too busy studying "and trying to get into a good PhD program
abroad."


8. (SBU) Why are so many of Sharif's best and brightest
studying abroad? We asked for the students' impressions of

ISTANBUL 00000466 003 OF 003


the recent "Newsweek" article's claim that Iran's poor
economy and repressive political atmosphere are contributing
to the elevated flows of top Iranian students abroad. All
agreed wholeheartedly, assessing that some 90% of Sharif
graduates seek PhD programs in the west -- especially the
United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia --
most with the intention of staying and working in those
countries. They described the disincentives to staying in
Iran as two-fold: "First, there are limited job
opportunities even for top students from Sharif, Tehran, and
other comparable universities, and those jobs do not offer
competitive salaries or job security. Second, many of us
feel the economic and political situation here over the next
few years will only worsen, because this government is
incapable of fixing it." They agreed that as Iran's social
policies become more restrictive and repressive, the "brain
drain" of top Iranian students moving abroad will probably
increase. Added to that is the positive incentive to study
abroad: "Top universities in the west want us. They are
starting to recruit from Sharif, offering fellowships or
scholarships, tenure tracks, and a real professional future."
As one student put it, "the choice is obvious. This
government doesn't want us; they say good riddance to us,
thinking of us as a nuisance rather than a national resource.
Places like Harvard and Stanford seek us out." The students
agreed that the Iranian government makes no effort to try to
stop Sharif students from studying abroad, with the exception
of charging them USD 900 to collect their diplomas if they
cannot demonstrate they have a job or onward graduate studies
program in Iran.


9. (SBU) Views on elections and sanctions: The students were
deeply pessimistic about the Iranian presidential elections
next year, predicting that no truly competitive reform
candidate would be allowed to run, that their votes would not
matter, and that either Ahmadinejad or Tehran Mayor Ghalibaf
would win, signaling in either case a continuation of current
Iranian policies. "As "The Who" once said, meet the new
boss, same as the old boss." One criticized the
international sanctions regime on Iran as "intending to
target the government programs the West doesn't like, such as
the nuclear and oil programs, but you are dealing with a
government that controls almost all economic levers. They
easily manipulate the effects of the sanctions to impact the
middle class, not themselves." He felt the sanctions regime
contributing to the growing corruption in Iran, arguing that
"if you haven't yet noticed, there is a direct correlation
between the increase of international sanctions and the
increase in regime-controlled corruption." As anecdotal
evidence, all the students we spoke to owned
U.S.-manufactured laptop computers, all imported via Dubai,
and all purchased at a substantial mark-up at computer stores
in Tehran "owned by the families of government ministers and
Pasdaran (IRGC) officers."


10. (C) Comment: Given that the students we spoke to
represent that top 0.05% of Iranian students in terms of
academic achievement, their views may not necessarily reflect
those of their wider demographic generation, although their
unhappiness with life in Iran tracks closely with the views
expressed by many other young Iranian contacts of ours, as
well as by the Iranian students with whom Embassy Baku
recently met (reftel). We were struck by their conclusion
that rather than try to stop a generation of future
scientific leaders from leaving, the Iranian government is
happy to see them go, a self-spiting tradition dating back to
Ayatollah Khomeinei's defiant rhetoric in 1979 embracing
"brain drain" as a means of "cleansing" Iran. We also found
it instructive that when Iran's very brightest students,
especially in the self-described "largely non-political"
environment of Sharif University, are confronted with the
choice of staying in Iran and working within (or beyond) the
system to effect gradual change through reform, or leaving to
find a better life elsewhere, some 90% choose to pursue the
latter. This is simply not a revolutionary bunch. While we
believe it remains in the USG's strong interest to continue
to encourage and support the desire of students like these to
seek PhD opportunities in the United States, it is
unfortunate that many of Iran's brightest students have been
politically disempowered to the point that they feel no stake
in trying to effect positive change at home. End comment.
OUDKIRK