In my last post, I linked a page. It shows an animation of how the scholarship allocation works. Students line up. The system sorts them by grades and choices. Each student gets the best seat their score can reach.

Then, at step five, something happened. If you saw the page, you know. If you didn’t, you have seen it somewhere else. In a queue you were standing in that suddenly did not matter. In a result that did not match the numbers. In a seat that filled before the line reached it. The page went dark. A counter changed quietly. And the system that worked perfectly for four steps had a hole in it that no algorithm could close.

Call it satire. Call it being critical. I prefer to call it wanting us to rise. Wanting our system to be the one other countries study. Not the one our own students learn to navigate around.

This post puts forward a plan to end it: a centralized admission system where that moment cannot happen. Not because someone catches it. Because the system leaves no place for it to happen.

And this is not my idea. It is Kuwait’s own idea, unfinished.

In July 2023, the Minister of Education, Hamad Al-Adwani, announced the first phase of a unified admission portal. The plan was stated clearly: one application for everything. Kuwait University. PAAET. Internal scholarships. External scholarships. Dr. Adel Al-Manea, then head of the Public Universities Council and later the Minister himself, ran the launch. Two of the ministry’s assistant undersecretaries, Fatema Al-Senan and Lamya Al-Melhem, said the same in interviews.

Then it stopped.

No second phase. No named person responsible. No deadline. The announcement happened. The system was never completed.

This is not a new idea. It is an unfinished one.

The problem.

Kuwait’s admissions run in a chain, one institution after another. Scholarships first. Then Kuwait University. Then Abdullah Al-Salem University. Then the private universities. Each round finishes before the next one starts.

The rounds are connected. But they share only one piece of information: who already took a seat. When one round ends, it sends its list to the next, so a student holding a seat cannot take another one unless he withdraws from the first.

So the connection exists. It is used only to block students. It is never used to help them.

The evidence.

The evidence comes from two places. From logical understanding of how the system works, which any family that went through an admission summer can confirm. And from the leaders themselves, who announced a unified portal in 2023 because they saw the same problem. Nobody promises one application for everything unless applying to everything is currently difficult.

Here is what the chain does. For years, there was one control on it: a withdrawal fee. A student who gave up a scholarship paid money. This punished families for changing their minds, and it was hardest on families with less money and wasta for those who had wasta. But it made holding an unwanted seat expensive.

Recently, the fee was removed. Now students hold seats freely, and the shopping has started.

Take Ahmed. He applies to the scholarship round and gets accepted. He takes the seat. Later, Kuwait University’s round opens. He withdraws from the scholarship, now for free, and registers at KU. He broke no rule. He did what any careful family would advise.

But three people can be hurt by this.

First, the student who was rejected in the scholarship round because Ahmed’s seat was taken. That round is closed now. When Ahmed returns the seat in September, it does not go back to July. That student’s chance is gone.

Second, the student who was accepted in the same round but ranked below Ahmed. She got a country or a major she did not want, while the seat she wanted stayed reserved under Ahmed’s name all summer. He was never going to use it.

Third, sometimes, Ahmed himself. Withdrawing is not one click. It is a request, an approval, a stamp, and processing days. Kuwait University’s registration window does not wait for that paperwork. If the withdrawal is processed too slowly, Ahmed misses KU while still officially holding a scholarship he asked to leave. He gave up a seat he had, for a seat he wanted, and got neither.

Nobody in this story is a villain. When the fee existed, students stayed in seats they did not want. With the fee removed, students hold extra seats and others lose chances. Kuwait has tried it both ways. Both ways fail. That proves the fee was never the real problem. The real problem is a chain that makes every seat final before students know all their options, with paperwork between every step.

The sorting is fair. Everything around it wastes seats, forces gambles, and cannot be checked. That is the problem.

Who else had this problem.

Britain, before it built one system. Georgia, in a worse form. Egypt still has it, and Egypt is the warning.

What they did.

Britain runs all university admission through one platform called UCAS. One application. Every university. Every course. More than 700,000 students a year. But the platform is not the important part. The important part is what is published around it. Every course shows the grades of last year’s accepted students, before anyone applies. A mother can look up medicine tonight and know if her daughter’s grades are close. She is not guessing.

Britain also gives time. The application season runs about five months. Not a few days.

And Britain gives a second chance. After results day, a published system called Clearing matches students without seats to seats that are still empty. No one’s application simply ends in silence. And an independent office, outside the universities and outside the ministry, reviews the whole process and publishes reports. The people who run the system are not the only ones who check it.

Georgia had the worse version of our problem. Before 2005, university seats there were openly bought with bribes. The fix was not speeches. It was design. Admission was taken away from the universities completely and given to one national exam. One score decides entry, for public and private universities. Exam papers carry barcodes instead of names, so no examiner knows whose paper they are grading. The law passed in 2004. The first exam ran in July 2005. One year. After that, calling a contact inside the university stopped working, because the contact no longer controlled anything.

Egypt shows what happens when you build one system but keep it closed. Its Tansiq system has placed every student by score for decades. One system, like ours would be. But while it runs, nobody outside can check it. There is no independent audit and no proper appeals process. Generations of Egyptian students describe being placed in majors they never chose. One system alone is not the answer. It must be one system that people can see into.

And Kuwait does not need to look far. Jordan publishes its full admission numbers every year: how many applied, how many were accepted, acceptance rates by programme, for every institution. The full picture, not just the cutoff. Oman has run one application for its universities and both scholarship types for nearly twenty years, and the system is written into law, with a bylaw published in the Official Gazette. Oman gave its system a legal document. Kuwait gave its system a press conference.

How long it took.

Britain’s system has run for decades. Oman’s for nearly twenty years. Jordan publishes every year. Georgia rebuilt its whole system in twelve months. These systems are not experiments anymore. They are normal life.

What Kuwait needs to do.

Five things. None needs a new law. All need a decision. One is already half done.

1. Finish what was started, or create a new one. The portal was announced. Phase one was built. Complete it: Kuwait University, PAAET, both scholarship plans, exactly as promised in 2023. Name one person responsible. Write the deadline in the founding document, the way Oman did. And note: the rounds already send data to each other to block students. The same connection can carry applications instead. The infrastructure exists.
2. Publish the full numbers, not just the cutoffs. Kuwait already publishes the lowest accepted GPA per specialisation. That is a start. But the rest is hidden. How many applied. How many were accepted. How many from public schools. How many from private schools. How many seats were available before the round started and how many were left after. The cutoff tells a student whether they could have gotten in. The full data tells them why they didn’t. One number is a result. The full picture is transparency.
3. Give families weeks, not days. Time to research, ask, and think. Britain gives five months. Kuwait does not need five months. It needs a year.
4. Publish the sorting method. Let any computer scientist in the country check it. By its own rules, our method rewards honesty: a student’s best move is to rank her true choices in her true order. Saying so publicly, and proving it, would let families rank their true choices with confidence. Keeping it hidden wastes its best feature.
5. Add an outside check. One audit per year, done by a body outside the ministry, published in full. That is the difference between a system trusted because it says so, and a system trusted because anyone can verify it.

The point.

Our own leaders announced this. One portal. One application. Everything. They were right. Phase one was right. Stopping was the mistake.

Britain’s lesson in one sentence: publish the numbers, and the guessing ends. Georgia’s lesson is shorter: when the rules are built into the system, there is no one left to call.

Jordan proved it works in an Arab country. Oman proved it works in the Gulf. Kuwait proved it can start.

With every summer this waits, more families rank their children’s futures on rumours.

Finish the portal, and get rid of those hindering the existence of it.