The Diplomacy of Higher (STEM) Education
- Drue Freeman
- Jan 24, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: May 14, 2024
By Drue Freeman
Originally Published on the Ojo-Yoshida Report January 20, 2023
Early this past summer my wife and I went on an exciting and enlightening trip to Georgia. I’m not talking about the home of Hank Aaron and the Atlanta Braves, the Coca-Cola Company, antebellum homes, or even peaches and peanuts. I’m talking about The Republic of Georgia - a former soviet republic, roughly half the size of the homonymous U.S. state – a country nestled in the Caucuses Mountains, abutting the Black Sea, sandwiched between Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan to the south and east and a large and aggressive bear known as The Russian Federation to the north (including the province of Chechnya). For centuries, Georgia has been at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, making it of great strategic importance commercially and militarily. Historically, the tiny nation has been part of the Mongol, Persian, Roman, Ottoman, and Soviet Empires. The population is majority Christian, but because of their history, there are sizable minorities of Muslims and Jews, all of whom seem to live in relative harmony with each other. It has only been fourteen years since their last civil war and some intense fighting with their neighbor to the north. The memories and scars of that era still linger. To this day, there are two regions of Georgia that claim independence from the rest of the country, but which are not recognized as independent by most of the rest of the world.
People who know us understand that my wife and I like to travel off the beaten tourist paths. But this trip left even some of my closest friends and colleagues scratching their heads: “why they heck did you go to Georgia? Isn’t that close to the war?” Well, yes and no. Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia is over 900 miles (nearly 1,500 km) from Kyiv as the crow flies. My somewhat flippant answer was usually, “anyway, Russia is a little preoccupied elsewhere at the moment.” We felt remarkably safe the entire time we were in Georgia, despite the war and the ongoing pandemic.
So why exactly did we go? While we greatly enjoyed some amazing sightseeing, outstanding food and wine, and the warm and hospitable culture of the Georgian people, the actual reason we traveled halfway around the world during a pandemic and war, to the middle of the Caucuses, was because we had the privilege of being invited to accompany a delegation from San Diego State University, headed by University President, Dr. Adela de la Torre. SDSU happens to have a satellite campus in Tbilisi, in partnership with Tbilisi State University, Ilia State University and Georgian Technical University. The primary purpose of the trip was to attend the commencement ceremony of SDSU Georgia, an internationally accredited STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) program that produced 160 bright, enthusiastic graduates in 2022, approximately 45% of whom are women.
A little recent history on Georgia and why SDSU has a campus there might be helpful at this point. In the wake of the brutal suppression by the Soviet Military of a peaceful rally in Tbilisi in 1989, which resulted in the deaths of 21 protestors, Georgia became one of the first countries to officially declare independence from Moscow in 1990 [1]. The early years of independence were anything but smooth. Georgia’s first president was removed in a violent coup d’état following two years of civil war and near economic collapse. Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister, seized control of the government, put an end to the civil war, and established a degree of domestic stability [2]. Shevardnadze’s pragmatic approach to diplomacy relied heavily on Russian appeasement, while simultaneously nurturing aspirations to establish stronger ties with the west. In his 1997 State of the Union Address, Shevardnadze stated that joining Europe “was for centuries the dream of our ancestors” [3]. However, the Shevardnadze era was also marked by corruption, economic mismanagement, and failed attempts at democratic reform. Shevardnadze’s eight-year reign was finally toppled by the peaceful Rose Revolution in November of 2003 [4]. After 2004, Georgian foreign policy continued shifting westward. Mikheil Saakashvili, who had studied law in the U.S., was elected president. The country formally declared ambitions to someday join the EU. In turn, the U.S. more proactively embraced Georgia’s regional strategic importance. George W. Bush became the first U.S. president to visit Georgia in 2005, where he praised Saakashvili’s democratic and economic ambitions, while calling on the government to further strengthen reforms.
In late 2005, the U.S., through an independent U.S. foreign assistance agency called the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), signed the first of two compacts with the Government of Georgia. The MCC was created with bipartisan Congressional support to address global poverty through results-oriented time-bound grant compacts promoting economic growth, good policies and governance and in-country ownership. The first Georgian compact focused primarily on improving infrastructure, including roads and energy rehabilitation, and enterprise development, especially in the agricultural sector, with the intention of helping the nation’s poor integrate into the economy through jobs and better access to services. This first compact remained in effect for a total of six years and carried a total price tag of nearly $400 million [5] [6].
At the conclusion of the first Georgia compact, the lack of an adequately trained workforce had been identified as a significant constraint to further economic growth and improvements in quality of life. As a result, a second compact was signed in 2013 with the objective of improving the earning potential of Georgians through education. The MCC and the Georgia Government focused the second compact on rehabilitating over 90 deteriorating public schools and equipping them with STEM labs, creating training programs for over 20 thousand educators and faculty, developing an additional 50-plus technical and vocational training programs in targeted professions, and establishing a STEM education partnership in three of the country’s top public universities [7]. The university partnership was specifically designed to ensure Georgia could produce the human capital required to sustain long-term economic development in infrastructure, IT, and transportation.
The Millennium Challenge Corporation sent out a Request for Proposal to U.S. public universities in 2013 to create internationally accredited U.S. degree programs in Georgia capable of producing high performing STEM graduates ready for employment in these critical growth areas. An additional, but equally urgent goal of the program was to increase STEM enrollment and graduation of women, ethnic and religious minorities, and students from rural and poor families. Several excellent proposals were submitted in response to the tender, with the San Diego State University proposal being considered the strongest overall. SDSU was awarded the contract and the first SDSU Georgia graduating class commenced in 2019. With the class of 2022, the program has now produced 410 highly trained STEM graduates, with the vast majority going directly into the Georgian workforce [Table 1]. Of the students who went on to graduate school, many are studying in the U.S., including at Yale, Cornell, Dartmouth, and other top-rated universities. This second Georgian Compact, including the partnership with SDSU, is considered one of the most successful in the history of the Millennium Challenge Corporation [8].
Table 1: Percentage SDSU Georgia graduates staying Georgia and Percentage going into Employment or Graduate School by Cohort. Source San Diego State University
In the days immediately prior to the 2022 commencement ceremony, we had the opportunity to visit the facilities at both Tbilisi State University and Ilia State University and talk with some of the students who were going through the SDSU Georgia program. We toured the Computer and Electrical Engineering Labs where the students were working on semiconductor and robotics projects, a Construction Engineering Lab complete with the latest test equipment for evaluating material strength and resilience, and the Chemistry Lab which included advanced electro-mass spectroscopy equipment and the only Nuclear Resonance Imaging machine in the region. Two of the young ladies we spoke with in the Chemistry lab were using the equipment to study long term heavy metal soil contamination left over from Soviet era mining operations near agricultural regions in the country.
On graduation day, we witnessed these students, and the rest of their cohorts, proudly parade into the Rustaveli Theater in the heart of Tbilisi, lining up for the ceremony while their families filled the seating of the historic building from floor to ceiling. College graduation is a time of great pride and joy for all students and their families, but one could sense that this was something just a little bit more. Many of these graduates represented the first generation of engineers and scientists in their families. These young adults left the theater that day brimming with optimism for their own futures and the future of Georgia. Thanks to SDSU Georgia they are properly equipped to go out into the world and become the technological architects of that future. In my conversations with the students and faculty it was also clear that they share a sense of accomplishment and self-confidence, that like Mother Georgia herself, they are ready to face adversity and take on the challenges that lay ahead of them. They felt pride in their young nation and in earning an internationally accredited degree from San Diego State University. And something that is perhaps too rare in the world today, they also felt appreciation towards the United States. That seems like a pretty successful form of diplomacy to me.
[1] "Government of Georgia:About Georgia". gov.ge. Archived from the original on 21 August 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160821030240/http://gov.ge/index.php?lang_id=ENG&sec_id=193
[3] Rondeli, A. (2001) “The Choice of Independent Georgia”, in Chufrin G. (ed.) The
Security of the Caspian Sea Region, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 208
[4] Jones, Stephen (2009) "Georgia's "Rose Revolution" of 2003: Enforcing Peaceful Change", in Roberts, A. and Ash, T.G., (eds.), Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 317-334. ISBN 978-0-19-955201-6
The author would like to thank the following people.
From SDSU: Dr. Hala Madanat and Dr. Willing Tong for assistance with the post-graduation statistics on SDSU Georgia, Kate Carinder for inviting my wife and me on this trip, and President Adela de la Torre for her steadfast commitment to the SDSU Georgia program.
From the Republic of Georgia: Dr. George Sharvashidze , Rector of Tbilisi State University, Magda Magradze, CEO of the Millenium Foundation, Dr. Halil Gueven, Dean of SDSU Georgia, and especially Julie Kapanadze, Legal Consultant for SDSU Georgia, for being such generous and gracious hosts.
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