Friday, November 12, 2010

Where Are Iran’s Top Students?


A friend of our blog has send us the photo of an Iranian newspaper cutout of June 2001, showing the pictures of the top 12 high school students in the country on that year, who had achieved top rankings in the difficult nationwide college entrance exams in the fields of mathematics and engineering, natural sciences, humanities, and arts.

The sender was able to identify some of the pictures and where they ended up after college. I thought to share the info with you.

Top row, right: Ms. Neda Nateq, ranked number one in math and engineering; Stanford University.

Top row, second from right: Ashkan Borna, ranked second in math and engineering, University of California, Berkley.

Top row, third from right: Ehsan Shafieie Pourafard, ranked third in math and engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Top row, fourth from right: Mohammad Fallahi, ranked number one in natural sciences, University of Michigan.

Top row, sixth from right: Payman Habibollahi, ranked third in natural sciences, Harvard.

Bottom row, right: Mohammad Reza Jalalipour, ranked number one in humanities, Evin prison, Tehran.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

What you trying to say? Looks like Iran is very open to immigration, you dislike it?

Jesse Aizenstat said...

he's not trying to say anything ... just that if you don't go to school in the US you get put in prison because Tehran University has gone so downhill.

Nader Uskowi said...

The issue here is brain drain, the country's lack of ability to absorbs its brightest. A large number of the student who take up graduate work at prestigious universities in the US do not normally return back to Iran, hence the brain drain. Studying at top universities shows the level of intelligence and intellect of the students in Iran and the students should be encouraged to go to those universities. It is the country that needs to organize itself in such a way as to attract the graduates of the top universities back to Iran.

Anonymous said...

yet another list for Mossad terrorists to assassinate.

Anonymous said...

Glad to hear they are moving forward. Nader, spot on and you can look at a country like South Korea to view as a shining example of how this has taken shape.

WMD said...

There's even a CIA project called "Braindrain".

"In all these schools, except for private universities such as the Islamic Azad University system, tuition and room and board, is mostly paid for by the government. The universities themselves largely operate on state budgets"... add to this that over 50% of enrollment are women (not commonly known in the west, needless to say).

In short, another "weapon" of economic warfare against lots of 3rd World countries with "free" higher education in general (like Cuba, etc.) and against Iran in particular (see above).
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WMD said...

BTW, another fine example of "privatizing profits and socializing losses", one of the pillars of neo-capitalist damage control.

Those "too big to fail" banks, bailed out with government money, are the first to make huge profits again while the homeless and unemployed -maybe even some of those "genius", educated for free, Iranians living in America- are still wondering if the worst has yet to come.
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