This paper argues that social pressures caused by rapid economic and demographic growth have led all the nations of the GCC to transform radically their 21st century higher educational systems. These significant changes, however, are not uniform across the region, and thus have sharply different implications for the region’s cultures and societies. The most ambitious efforts have attempted to cluster higher educational institutions in one area or “city”. This paper argues that these new initiatives have different effects on the structure of city life, the role of the state, and work relations between and amongst the national and expatriate professional classes. “The Emergence of Higher Educational” examines two different higher educational clusters that have been established over the past two decades. The two are Dubai’s Knowledge Village and International Academic City and Qatar’s Education City. The different educational models embodied in these “cities” are substantial. The Dubai case represents a neoliberal approach to higher educational reform that allows the market to determine which educational institutions will be successful. Branch campuses are encouraged to establish small and large degree programs, but the state itself makes only a small commitment to the viability of any particular institution. The Qatar model, like the Dubai approach, emphasizes the importation of branch campuses. On the other hand, the goal of the government is to ensure that only prestigious academic programs are established by well-respected Western universities. Rather than leaving educational restructuring to the market, the Qatar Foundation heavily subsidizes this project and links this effort to the creation of a dynamic government-directed “knowledge economy”. This paper hypothesizes that these different approaches create distinct roles for the academic city in the larger Gulf metropolis. Dubai’s Knowledge Village and International Academic City have largely merged into the rest of the city as two free trade zones amongst many. The Qatar approach has more aggressively attempted to construct a larger cluster of academic and research projects that are restructuring the city of Doha itself. On a political level: educational reform plays a much larger role within the state in Qatar than it does in Dubai. On a social level: a greater effort has been made by Qatari authorities to integrate nationals into these educational and economic projects, while in Dubai, nationals continue to rely on underfunded federal institutions for university and college education.