Carnegie Mellon University to open campus in Rwanda

Chronicle of Higher Education : Carnegie Mellon will become one of the few American colleges that offer degrees in Africa when it opens a branch campus in Rwanda in 2012. Carnegie Mellon is receiving $95 million over 10 years from the Rwandan government to operate the program, which will initially offer master’s degrees in information technology and electrical and computer engineering. The university will hire between 15 and 20 faculty members to teach at the new campus; to ensure that courses in Rwanda are of similar rigor to those in the US, the new faculty will first go to the university’s home campus in Pittsburgh to familiarize themselves with the institution’s curriculum and teaching style. In the future, Carnegie Mellon may also offer PhDs at the new campus, but it has no plans to enroll undergraduates there at this time. It will instead focus on working with local colleges to improve the pipeline of African applicants to the program.