“The U.A.E. and Qatar also have the highest rates of immigration in the world,” she added. “In some ways that’s nice for them. They can rely on an army of underpaid workers. But 85 percent of the population are not citizens. A majority of the country doesn’t speak Arabic. They see their culture being eroded. The government would like to reduce their reliance on foreigners — at least for skilled professions like law or medicine or engineering. So they turn to cash to try to incentivize education.”

Many countries around the world use some form of financial incentive to encourage students. In the United States, where most universities are private and tuition fees are high, scholarships based on merit are often awarded to the brightest applicants to encourage them to attend a particular school. In Europe, where fees are generally lower, bursaries for travel abroad are common, and some institutions, like the University of Amsterdam, offer merit scholarships to “outstanding students from outside the European Economic Area” who would otherwise face steep tuition fees. But the use of outright cash payments for good grades is far less common. Last year Time magazine reported on the controversy that erupted when Roland Fryer, a professor at Harvard’s Educational Innovation Laboratory, proposed paying fourth graders in New York up to $25 for doing well on tests. “Most adults work primarily for money, and in a curious way, we seem to be holding kids to a higher standard than we hold ourselves,” Dr. Fryer told Time.

Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, pointed out that “in China academics are given extra money — often significant amounts — if they publish in good journals.” But he went on to say, “In my opinion just giving money to students to spend as they wish is not right. Higher education is sufficiently part of the ‘market’ already.”

Most educators seem to find the very idea distasteful. Even Mourad Tlili, a spokesman for the Abu Dhabi Education Council, insists that cash incentives are used “along with more common forms of recognition like certificates of appreciation, honors listing and letters of recognition.” Out of 838 students enrolled in the Scholarship System, “this year 139 students have been given different kinds of incentives,” he said.

Jamil Salmi, higher education coordinator for the World Bank, said that in his native Morocco the government did pay some students to attend teacher training colleges. “But these were not their first choice colleges, and the country had a shortage of qualified teachers,” he said. “In Colombia students lose their scholarships if they don’t keep up their grades. That has had a very powerful effect on dropout rates. But to give money as an entitlement in exchange for academic achievement — my sense is that it is a mistake.”

Andreas Schleicher, an education expert at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said: “My personal view is that this is going in the wrong direction. If we cannot convince students of the relevance of what they learn and that the economic and social benefits they derive from learning outweigh their costs then there is something fundamentally wrong.”

However widely held, do such views represent anything more than entrenched prejudice? Edward Deci maintains they do. “What we think of as the amount of motivation is not nearly as important as the type of motivation,” said Mr. Deci, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and the author of “Why We Do What We Do.”