Spotlight
Rethinking the university experience
Dr Haifa Reda Jamal Al-Lail, President of Effat University, discusses embedding practical experience into higher education and closing the gap between graduate capabilities and employer needs.
15 October 2026
Over the past year, how have your institution’s vision and mission adapted and what have been the key priorities for you?
The updated institutional framework emphasises becoming a premier global higher education centre for scientific discovery, innovation and societal impact. Effat University’s vision and mission increasingly align with Saudi Vision 2030 by targeting international-quality leadership and making tangible contributions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The university achieves this by prioritising green campus operations — including 100% wastewater recycling and energy conservation — and advancing its digital transformation through AI-enhanced, cloud-based management systems for data-driven decisions. Furthermore, Effat actively pursues prestigious international accreditations such as NECHE, ABET and AACSB to elevate academic quality and boost its standing in the QS and THE world rankings, while broadening access through co-educational pathways in high-demand fields like business, energy engineering, product design and clinical psychology.
The skills agenda remains an important factor for universities and students. Where have those skills changed, and how is your university leading the conversation?
Effat University leads the "acquired skills" agenda by transforming the educational model from static, knowledge-based degrees into dynamic, verifiable market readiness. As the first private, non-profit female higher education institution in Saudi Arabia, Effat has continuously pioneered human-centric pedagogy. The university addresses the workforce readiness gap by advocating that soft skills, and digital competencies must be structurally embedded into the student journey. This change happens by integrating academic learning with personal growth. Course syllabi map back to "IQRA" Core Values to track student mastery, mandating experiential learning through the Effat Ambassadors Program to solve the industry problem and make the graduates ready for the corporate world.
Effat proactively spearheads academic research and operational deployment around 21st-century digital competencies. Effat acts as an active intellectual contributor to regional upskilling strategies. For instance, the university publishes research evaluating competency-based education, leadership gaps and emotional intelligence needs within transforming local ecosystems like healthcare. The university champions hands-on applied learning. Through its internationally accredited colleges (holding ABET, AACSB and NECHE milestones), undergraduate and graduate students must co-develop capstones that tie directly to public and private sector challenges. This structural inclusion forces students to navigate real-world organisational dynamics, resource constraints and professional networking before graduating.
What is a challenge in your region that universities alone cannot solve, and what are the key partnership areas that can?
The Arab region's paradox of concurrent high graduate unemployment and severe corporate talent shortages stems from a systemic application gap that universities alone cannot solve. Traditional higher education is structurally outpaced by fast-moving sectors like AI and fintech and lacks the commercial environments required to instil real-world emotional and operational resilience. To bridge this gap, the regional ecosystem must deploy deep, multi-sector coalitions. Scalable transformation requires shifting to public-private curriculum co-authoring, establishing campus-based corporate science parks, enforcing mandatory national co-op frameworks and utilising skills-based hiring platforms that prioritise verified student capability over traditional credentials.
If you could set the direction for all of higher education, what is the one area you would direct the sector towards?
If Effat University could direct the trajectory of the entire higher education sector, the single area I would focus on is the mandatory transition to an "Integrated Experiential Learning" model. This means completely dismantling the traditional, centuries-old divide between academic study and professional application. Instead of treating real-world work experience as an optional, end-of-degree add-on, it must become the structural backbone of every semester a student sits in higher education. This directional shift answers the two greatest challenges facing modern universities: the rapidly shrinking shelf-life of technical knowledge and the global graduate employability gap.