Qatar campus claims meant to showcase opportunity are facing new scrutiny after a watchdog report found Northwestern University’s branch in Doha overwhelmingly educates the country’s ruling elite. The findings raise questions about whether the Qatar campus serves marginalized students—or entrenches power among families tied to the regime and Hamas.
Northwestern Qatar, or NU-Q, has graduated 729 students since 2014. According to a Middle East Forum report, roughly one in five graduates comes from the Qatari elite, including members of the ruling Al Thani family. In 2020 alone, 35 percent of graduates were royals or members of elite families. The report notes that Qatar tightly controls surnames, making it “all but impossible” for someone named Al Thani not to belong to the royal family.
Those figures clash with Northwestern’s public defense of the Qatar Campus. Earlier this year, the university said, “Northwestern University in Qatar has provided international students—over 70 percent of whom are women—access to an elite, western education and helped further the foreign policy interests of the United States government.”
The report counters that narrative. “Taken together, the data suggests a systematic admissions pattern in which NU-Q has enrolled a disproportionately high number of students from the same ruling families who fund, govern, and benefit from the institution,” it states. It adds, “In essence, NU-Q acts as a training center for Qatar’s next generation of leadership.”
Northwestern opened the campus in 2008 with funding from the Qatar Foundation and has received $737 million from the state-backed entity. That relationship has drawn heightened attention since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and revelations that Qatari officials attempted to use NU-Q to circulate talking points. One email from a foundation executive read, “Finally, let there be no doubt about this—QF always has and always will stand with Palestine.”
Northwestern’s contract with Qatar expires in 2028, and the university says it is conducting a “multiyear review” of its Qatar campus ties.
