Well, the first Saudi Fulbright scholar is already in the US. Yeah! This is a very Good Thing. Now one of the guys in line to go to the US next year has contacted. He will be going to the US for two years to get his MBA. He has been offered four schools. Which should he take?
1 University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
2 University of Wisconsin at Whitewater
3 University of South Carolina (Moore School of Business)
4 Florida International University
I know nothing of this. I presume FIU is a non-starter as the name simply does not sound like an American university.
Criteria? Everything by tuition cost. Cost of living counts. Also I am interested in Muslim-Friendliness.
Your thoughts, please?
Big cities in the US tend to be better environments for folks who are neither the general rule nor the first-tier exception to the rule. Milwaukee therefore good, Whitewater not so much.
Dunno anything about the South Carolina school, but regionally speaking the American south is more politically conservative, which at least at the moment is heavily bound up with fundamentalist forms of Christianity, which also holds sway over that region. I am not Muslim and haven’t spend a lot of time in South Carolina (let alone Moore School of Biz) but I’ll go out on a limb and say for the above-stated reasons it would probably not be as Muslim-friendly as Milwaukee. I could be dead wrong though. Lots of Iranians settled in the south for some reason in the 80s (often cleverly referring to themselves as “Persians”, correctly guessing that the average American would not realize that meant “iran”). Could be a pocket close to Moore.
Never heard of Florida International University. There may be a slew of nice universities I haven’t heard of. Where in Florida? Florida is a bit unlike the rest of the American south, lots of folks emigrated there from the 60’s onwards, including retirees from New York, it was a gay mecca in the late 70s, attracted a lot of business and therefore emigrees who came for business opportunities, Cubanos in the southern part, etc etc. So some parts of Florida are pretty cosmopolitan and multicultural, but it’s not uniformly distributed.
Check it out:
MBARankings.org (who gets their data from Business Week’s rankings) says Wisconsin (MADISON) is ranked 35th, and SC ranked 51st. Not sure how the 2 Wisconsin offshoots compare with/rank the main school.
I’d say tho if you’re used to the weather in Saudi Arabia, you might be more inclined to go to SC than WI 
Here’s Wikipedia’s report on Business Week et al MBA rankings.
I just checked, **FIU is a public school in Miami. Huge city, on the other hand no so many Muslims, I’m thinking. (Is that bad? The idea is to meet new people.) They have a graphics-intensive website, it is taking forever to load. Another mark against them. Wiki Link A huge school.
UWW seems quite proud of their dorms. (I am going on first impressions of the web site here.) Gosh 'Whitewater, Wisconsin" sounds cold. Wiki Linki John Belushi went there.
UWM is located in the city. How is Milwaukee?It has the Golda Meir Library! Wonderful! Wiki link: here High-rise dorms.
UNC (MSoB) Only a link. I have to go to work. Link
I screwed up the coding on that, didn’t I?