 The medium of instruction in both public and private schools is Arabic with emphasis on English as a second language, but some private schools founded by foreign entities such as International schools use the English language for medium of instruction.Some of these are coeducational while other schools are not.For higher education, the city has only one university, Umm Al-Qura University, which was established in 1949 as a college and became a public university in 1979.