As the small states that line the Arabian Peninsula spend billions of petrodollars picking up luxury hotels, satellite television stations, first-class airlines, and high-tech weaponry, three of the emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar) are engaged in a high-stakes game of one-upmanship involving universities, American universities in particular. The region's traditional centers of education have been eclipsed by war, poverty, and political strife. Recent reports by the United Nations, the World Bank, and others have criticized the educational systems in the gulf as weak and limited in scope, fueling the aggressive push to import high-quality programs. Each country has adopted a different model to woo potential academic suitors. Qatar, less than half the size and with little more than half the population of New Hampshire, has succeeded in part by offering foreign institutions money. The government pays full tuition for all Qatari students, who make up about half of the enrollment. Universities have complete control over their annually submitted budget, while all of their costs, including construction and salaries, are shouldered by the foundation. The multi-university approach has its drawbacks: there is little coordination among the various programs, so that a number of universities offer the same core curriculum, and much-hoped-for synergies between programs have yet to materialize. Dubai's main foreign higher-education is set up as a profit-making enterprise, where buildings are leased to foreign universities. Dubai also has a different target audience: its massive expatriate community, which accounts for 90 percent of the emirate's population. Dubai's Education City enrolls fewer than 1,000 students, in large part because the emirate's goal is to train its own citizens by offering a limited number of higher-education programs. Yet with the planned creation of a second complex, International Academic City, Dubai has also revealed expanded ambitions, and a long-term development plan that will place universities within industrial clusters to form symbiotic relationships. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates and estimated to be home to 10 percent of the world's oil, worth as much as $3-trillion, is trying a little of everything, building an experimental prototype city that will house, in addition to academic complexes, up to 1,500 technology companies (tax-free and with full foreign ownership.). Some experts are skeptical that opening branches of marquee universities is the best way for these gulf states to improve their education systems, saying that what works in America won't necessarily work in the Middle East, nor necessarily be in students' best interests. The emirates may also be getting more than they bargained for by introducing Western institutions with no indigenous roots, with social repercussions, both positive and negative. Gulf leaders say they are aware of those limitations but don't have the time to build an indigenous system from scratch, that there is an urgent need for quality programs that will produce students right away. Whatever the outcome and approach, concludes the writer, there is no doubt that the gulf states are committed to bringing new life to once-stagnant higher-education systems.