Pakistan's Rising College Education Rates

There are over 3 million students enrolled in grades 13 through 16 in Pakistan's 1,086 degree colleges and 161 universities, according to Pakistan Higher Education Commission report for 2013-14.  The 3 million enrollment is 15% of the 20 million Pakistanis in the eligible age group of 18-24 years.  In addition, there are over 255,000 Pakistanis enrolled in vocational training schools, according to Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (TEVTA).

Graduation Day at NED Engineering University For 1300 Graduates in 2013
Pakistani universities have been producing over half a million graduates, including over 10,000 IT graduates, every year since 2010, according to HEC data. The number of university graduates in Pakistan increased from 380,773 in 2005-6 to 493,993 in 2008-09. This figure is growing with rising enrollment and contributing to Pakistan's growing human capital.


Rising University Enrollment in Pakistan Starting in 2001-2002. Source: ICEF Monitor


Source: UNESCO's Global Education Digest 2009



Higher education in Pakistan has come a long way since its independence in 1947 when there was only one university, the University of Punjab. By 1997, the number of universities had risen to 35, of which 3 were federally administered and 22 were under the provincial governments, with a combined enrollment of 71,819 students. A big spending boost by President Pervez Musharraf helped establish 51 new universities and awarding institutions during 2002-2008. This helped triple university enrollment from 135,000 in 2003 to about 400,000 in 2008, according to Dr. Ata ur Rehman who led the charge for expanding higher education during Musharraf years. There are 161 universities with 1.5 million students enrolled in Pakistan as of 2014.



Former Chairman of HEC summed up the country's higher education progress well in a piece he wrote for The News in 2012: "Pakistan has achieved critical mass and reached a point of take-off. For this phenomenal growth to continue, it is important for the government and other stakeholders to support and further strengthen the HEC as a national institution and protect its autonomy. If this momentum continues for another 10 years, Pakistan is certain to become a global player through a flourishing knowledge economy and a highly literate population".

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

10 Pakistan Universities Among Top 300 in Asia

Pakistan's Growing Human Capital

History of Literacy in Pakistan

Education Attainment in South Asia

Dr. Ata ur Rehman Defends HEC Reforms

Biotech and Genomics in Pakistan

Business Education in Pakistan

Armed Drones Outrage and Inspire Young Pakistanis

Comments

Riaz Haq said…
CNN on Hans Rosling's "Ignorance Project":

The world is spinning so fast that it can be hard to keep track of everything that is going on. Yet despite the fact that we can feel like we are being increasingly overloaded with information, it's not clear that we're doing a very good job of making sense of all that data we're receiving.

Don't believe me? Well, try answering these three questions on major global trends:

1) What percent of 1-year-olds in the world are vaccinated against measles? Is it 20, 50 or 80%?

2) Young adult men today have, on average, eight years of schooling, globally. How many years of school do you think the world's women of the same age have attended? Is it 3 years, 5 years or 7 years?

3) How has the proportion of people living in extreme poverty around the world changed over the past 25 years? Has it doubled, stayed about the same, or been halved?

So, here are the answers: Around 83 percent of the world's 1-year-olds are vaccinated against measles; 25-year-old women have, on average, been to school almost as long as males the same age, having attended for about seven years; and extreme poverty has been more than halved since 1990.

Did you get those right? You probably didn't. And you're very far from alone. In fact, when the Gapminder Foundation partnered with polling firms around the world to ask members of the public in Europe and the United States these and similar questions, what we found was a depressing lack of awareness about some of the most basic facts about our world. In fact, less than a fifth of Americans, Swedes, Germans and Britons answered these three questions correctly.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the world we live in is about global population growth. The number of children in the world has actually stopped increasing, because 80 percent of us live in societies where the two-child family is the norm. And how many people would have guessed that women in Brazil, Iran and Vietnam today have fewer babies, on average, than women in the United States?

In a way, this lack of knowledge shouldn't come as much of a surprise because there is something that actively skews our thought process: Preconceived ideas.

We all have them. Even those of us who think we keep abreast of what is going on in the world have personal biases because we have been taught a mountain of facts that are now outdated, whether we learned them in school or at work. And then there is our news media, which is built upon conflict and a black-and-white model of explanation (hence our susceptibility to negative headlines).

All this means that if you went to the zoo with the questions posed earlier written down on piece of cardboard, placed a banana beside each of the three alternatives and let some chimps have a go at picking the answers, they could be expected to get one in three questions correct, beating most humans in the process.

Does our ignorance of strong positive trends, which makes us believe that the world is a sicker, worse place than it is, really matter?

Yes, because as a result we are more likely to make the wrong decisions. Indeed, a world view based on outdated facts can have severe consequences -- from not investing where we will get the best returns, to allocating aid where it might have little impact.

With this in mind, the director of Gapminder, Ola Rosling, has launched The Ignorance Project in an effort to identify where our collective knowledge is weakest, and therefore where we might be likely to make the biggest mistakes. We will be formulating 250 questions on major aspects of global development and the state of the world and, over five years, will gradually identify the 25 least known but important global facts through surveys across 130 countries.

With luck, by highlighting just how little we know about the world, we will be able to encourage fact-based teaching of the world in our schools.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/07/opinions/rosling-global-knowledge/
Riaz Haq said…
Times of India Op Ed by Morgan Stanley's Head of Emerging Markets Ruchir Sharma on "The Quiet Rise of South Asia":

Together, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan are now growing at an average annual pace of close to 6%, compared to 2% for the emerging world outside China.
Due to their lower per capita income, it should hardly be surprising that South Asian economies are growing faster than other emerging markets. But that spread of nearly four percentage points is the largest in the region’s post-independence history. While hopes for a revival in India exploded when Prime Minister Narendra Modi took power in 2014, promising major economic reform, its smaller neighbours remained under the radar. Now, however, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan are leading the quiet rise of South Asia.
Since the global financial crisis, a number of emerging markets have been ramping up debt and government spending. But the smaller South Asian economies have largely avoided these excesses, so they still have room to boost growth. While falling prices for oil and other raw materials are hurting most emerging regions, they are a boon to the nations of South Asia, all of which are commodity importers.
The impact of low commodity prices is helping to keep inflation low even as growth accelerates, while countries like Brazil, Russia and South Africa face stagflation. Many emerging economies have been hurt by rising wages and have seen their share of global exports decline, but not Pakistan and Bangladesh. Their wages are still competitive, and they are increasing their share of global exports, even as growth in global trade is stagnating for the first time since the 1980s.
They are benefitting along with Sri Lanka as manufacturers look for cheaper wages outside of China, with wages in the manufacturing sector having increased by 370% in the world’s second largest economy over the past decade. Bangladesh is now the second leading exporter, after China, of ready-made clothes to the US and Germany.
And as China and Japan compete with India for influence in the Indian Ocean, they are pouring billions into new ports in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The upshot of these positive trends is that South Asia could sustain a growth rate of over 5% for the next few years, which would make it one of the fastest-growing regions in the emerging world.
The competition between Japan and China is a huge boost: after Beijing recently announced plans to build a $46 billion “economic corridor” connecting Pakistan to China, Japan beat out China for rights to build Bangladesh’s first deep-water port, at Matarbari. The inflow of foreign direct investment is helping to keep South Asia in what can be identified as the investment sweet spot: strong economies tend to invest between 25 and 35% of GDP. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh are now right in the sweet spot, at or near 30% of GDP.
Investment also tends to have the greatest impact on jobs and growth when it is going into manufacturing. Both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have strong manufacturing sectors, representing 18% of GDP. Pakistan is much weaker, with investment at 14% and manufacturing at 12% of GDP. But Pakistan’s manufacturing sector is now growing, due to both increasing electric output and the fact that – like Bangladesh – its young population and labour force is expected to continue expanding for at least the next five years.
At a time when much of the workforce is entering retirement age in larger emerging nations including China, Korea, Taiwan and Russia, the positive demographic trends in South Asia are potentially a big competitive advantage. With exports and investment strong, Bangladesh is running a current account surplus, Sri Lanka is reducing a deficit now equal to 3% of GDP, and Pakistan has cut its current account deficit from 8% of GDP in 2008 to just 1%.

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/bucking-stagnation-elsewhere-the-quiet-rise-of-south-asia/
Riaz Haq said…
#Pakistan, the Next #software Hub? 1500 registered #informationtechnology companies, 10,000 IT grads every year. http://nyti.ms/1P0Yfdu

Pakistan’s I.T. sector is carving a niche for itself as a favored place to go for freelance I.T. programmers, software coders and app designers. There are now 1,500 registered I.T. companies in Pakistan, and 10,000 I.T. grads enter the market every year. Energetic members of the middle class educated in Pakistan’s top universities, they have honed their skills at the many hackathons, start-up fairs and expos, digital summits and entrepreneurial events at campuses, software houses and I.T. associations across the country.

Next comes showcasing their skills to a global market in order to grow businesses. So Pakistani freelance programmers flock to global freelance hiring sites such as Upwork, or fiverr.com, where digital employers in the United States, Australia or Britain bid to hire programmers for small software and app projects. On these platforms, hiring someone from Pakistan becomes as easy as hiring someone from Ireland or India, because traditional concerns about security, corruption and invasive bureaucracy in Pakistan do not apply.

The formula is working: the Pakistani programmers market ranks as the No. 3 country for supplying — freelance programmers — behind only the United States and India, and up from No. 5 just two years ago. It ranks in the upper 10 to 25 percent on Upwork’s listing of growth rates for top-earning countries, alongside India, Canada and Ukraine. Pakistan’s freelance programmers already account for $850 million of the country’s software exports; that number could go up to $1 billion in the next several months, says Umar Saif, who heads the Punjab I.T. Board and previously taught and did research work at M.I.T.

The optimism one hears in Karachi and Lahore even withstood a scandal last May, when news broke that Axact, one of Pakistan’s largest I.T. companies, was operating as a fake degree mill. Members of the tight-knit I.T. community reacted at first with fears for Pakistan’s chances to become a major player on the world’s I.T. stage. Perhaps those fears acted as a spur to the authorities, who arrested Axact’s chief within weeks after the scheme was laid bare.

In any event, three days after investigators raided Axact’s offices, Naseeb Networks International, a Lahore-based company that runs the online job marketplace Rozee.pk, announced that it had won a third round of investments, worth $6.5 million, from the European investment firms Vostok Nafta and Piton Capital, bringing the company’s total venture capital funding to $8.5 million. It was the latest in a series of large venture capital investments in Pakistan over the last year and a half.

---------

It’s now also faster and easier for foreign companies to acquire the apps these programmers create, in contrast with negotiating traditional service contracts, and Mr. Saif anticipates that such start-ups will themselves become targets for acquisition by overseas companies.

According to him, venture capital is the one missing ingredient in an enabling environment that the government, universities and software associations are building. Per Brilioth, the managing director of Vostok Nafta Investment, agrees. “The macro indicators and demographics are very strong,” he said, “and the country doesn't seem to get a lot of investor attention, so valuations are reasonable."

Those factors — and the rapidity with which Pakistan’s 200 million people are embracing the Internet on sub-$50 Chinese 3G smartphones — are markers on which Pakistan’s entrepreneurial leaders pin their hopes for the future. They see problems like Axact as bumps in the road as Pakistan builds a haven for I.T. development.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/opinion/bina-shah-pakistan-the-next-software-hub.html?_r=0
Riaz Haq said…
#China to build $1.5 billion science park in #Islamabad #Pakistan http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/national/25-Nov-2015/china-to-invest-1-5bn-for-pakistan-china-science-park …

China on Wednesday agreed to invest $1.5 billion to set up Pakistan-China Science Park in Islamabad.

Minister for Science and Technology Rana Tanvir Hussain - who is on a visit to China - signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with his Chinese counterpart UN Urmaqi. He also invited the Chinese investers to visit Islamabad in next month to select location for construction of the Park by March 2016. He expressed his gratitude for huge investment in Pakistan.

The minister said that Pakistan and China had a lot to share with each other in term of technology, expertise and business. “We are looking to strengthen our mutual ties on economic as well as technological fronts,” he said, adding that this project would prove to be a link of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). It would bring prosperity to the people of both sides.
Riaz Haq said…
Excerpts of "Mapping Higher Education in Pakistan" from MIT Technology Review Pakistan:

http://www.technologyreview.pk/mapping-higher-education-in-pakistan/

Starting its journey in 1947 with only one university, the University of the Punjab (established in 1882), Pakistan today has 177 universities and degree awarding institutions (DAIs), spreading across its map and the number is growing fast. Of these 177 universities and DAIs, 103 are public while the rest have been established by the private sector. The government has awarded charter to 33 of these universities and DAIs while the rest have been chartered by the respective provincial governments. The federally chartered universities and the DAIs are mostly located in the federal capital, Islamabad, but some operate in other cities of the country too. For example, the Karakoram International University is a federal chartered university and is based in Gilgit-Baltistan.

Pakistan’s most populous province, Punjab, with an estimated population of over 90 million, half of the country’s total population, is on top of the rank with its 51 chartered universities and DAIs (27 public and 24 private) while the Sindh province, which has almost population equal to half of Punjab’s, ranks second with its 49 universities and DAIs. But unlike Punjab, Sindh province has more private universities and DAIs as only 20 out of 49 are public.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) has 29 universities, Balochistan province eight while there are seven universities chartered by the Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK) government.

PhDs produced in Pakistan since 1947
From 1947 to 2014, Pakistan’s higher education institutes (HEIs) produced 11,988 PhDs. As of 2014, Pakistan, having an estimated population of over 180 million, had student enrollment of 1.4 million, including over 900 foreign students and Afghan refugees, studying in various HEIs. The percentage of female students in the HEIs was around 40 percent.

From 1947 to 2002, Pakistani universities had produced only over 3,000 PhDs. However, the country witnessed a sharp rise vis-à-vis PhDs produced per year. From 202 in the year 2001 before the Higher Education Commission (HEC) was established, to 1,211 PhDs in year 2013 and 1,325 PhDs in the year 2014.

Most of the PhDs, 1,541, were produced in Language and Literature, followed by 1,462 in Chemistry and 933 in Agriculture. Up to the year 2014, the country’s HEIs had produced only 500 PhDs in Engineering and Technology while 908 PhDs were awarded in Religious Studies.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) which drew its powers from The University Grants Commission Act, 1974 was replaced by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002.

A comparison of funding to the universities by the UGC and the HEC is enough to understand the level of commitment to higher education by the successive governments in Pakistan. The UGC provided funding of PKR 7,538.835 million to the universities from financial year 1978-79 to 2001-02 while after the establishment of the HEC, a whopping PKR 115,413.194 million have been pumped into universities by the commission from the financial year 2002-03 to 2015-16.
Riaz Haq said…
Pakistan Education Statistics 2015-16.pdf


http://library.aepam.edu.pk/Books/Pakistan%20Education%20Statistics%202015-16.pdf

In Pakistan, 1,418 degree colleges are
providing their services in education
system. Out of these 1,259 (89%) are in
public sector, whereas 159 (11%) are in
private sector.
The total enrolment at degree college
stage i.e. in grades 13 and 14, is 0.937
million. Out of these students at this
stage of education, 0.808 million (86%)
are completing their degrees from public
sector, whereas, rest of the 0.128 million
(14%) students are in private sector.
There are only 11% degree colleges are
running under private sector of
education, the reason is that these
colleges tend to be more expensive then
public colleges.

----------

There are total 163 universities
providing their services in both public
and private sector of education. Out of
these universities 91 (56%) are working
under umbrella of public sector,
whereas 72 (44%) are working under the
supervision of private sector as
reflected.
The total enrolment in the universities,
i.e., at post graduate stage, is 1.355
million. Out of this enrolment 1.141
million (84%) students are enrolled in
public universities, whereas, 0.214
million (16%) students are studying in
private universities. Despite the fact
that there are more universities in public
sector there are less students in these
universities as compare of private
sector.
The total male enrolment in the
universities is 0.753 million (56%),
whereas, the female enrolment is 0.602
million (44%).
Riaz Haq said…
#Pakistan doctoral grads produced in 2014: 1351 #PhD #education http://www.hec.gov.pk/english/universities/Pages/PhD-Produced-by-Pakistani-Universities.aspx …

https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/945411423760347136
Riaz Haq said…
National Assembly Standing Committee on Federal Education and Professional Training was on Monday informed that currently around 3 million students were studying in country-wide public and private sector 195 universities (grade 15-16)

https://dunyanews.tv/en/Pakistan/492413-Currently-3mn-students-studying-public-private-universities-NA-Body-told

In his briefing to the committee on Monday, Chairman Higher Education Commission (HEC) Dr Tariq Banuri said the number of students was being increased from 10 to 15 percent each year.

The committee meeting held here under the Chairmanship of Member National Assembly (MNA) Najeeb Ud Din Awaisi was also attended by the other committee members and officials from PEIRA, HEC, AIOU and Ministry of Federal Education.

Dr Tariq Banuri further said that HEC distributes the government funds of higher education to the universities. Around 15,000 research journals had been published last years, the Chairman said adding that HEC provides funds of Rs one billion to the universities in term of research work.

To a question of committee member that whether HEC foreign scholars come back after completing education, the Chairman HEC replied that the return ratio of HEC scholars from abroad was around 97 percent. This return ratio, he said was better than many other countries.

MNA Ali Nawaz Awan asked about the conditions of HEC for awarding registration to the private higher educational institutions as the number of private universities in federal capital was increasing speedily.

Replying the question, Dr Tariq Banuri said that HEC do not manage the universities but regulate them. He further said that HEC reviewing this issue and the universities which were violating the HEC rules in educational programs that were being banned for further admissions.

Dr Tariq also told the standing committee on federal education that HEC funds were being reduced and requested the committee to support HEC in this regard as it would be a major crisis for higher educational institutions.

The committee also stressed the need of capacity building for teachers as professors of Urdu University were lodging FIR’s against its students.

On demand of the committee, the representatives of private educational schools presented the recommendations to make the role of Private Educational Institutions Regulatory Authority (PEIRA) more functional.

President Private Schools Association Zafran Elahi told the committee that PEIRA was being run illegally after 2015.

Secretary Private Schools Association Abdul Waheed said that PEIRA had wasted thousands of rupees deliberately in fake cases.

President Private Schools Network Dr Afzal Babar said that PEIRA had failed in its basic aim of registration, regulation and promotion of the institutions.
Riaz Haq said…
The (Pakistan) University Grants Commission (UGC) which drew its powers from The University Grants Commission Act, 1974 was replaced by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002.

http://www.technologyreview.pk/mapping-higher-education-in-pakistan/

A comparison of funding to the universities by the UGC and the HEC is enough to understand the level of commitment to higher education by the successive governments in Pakistan. The UGC provided funding of PKR 7,538.835 million to the universities from financial year 1978-79 to 2001-02 while after the establishment of the HEC, a whopping PKR 115,413.194 million have been pumped into universities by the commission from the financial year 2002-03 to 2015-16.

University education versus school education
The Pakistani universities and DAIs are offering academic and research programs in anthropology, agriculture, space sciences, fisheries and aquaculture, computer science and IT, business and management, engineering and technology, veterinary science, psychology, so on and so forth.

With institutes of higher learning like the Virtual University (VU), the country’s first university based completely on modern information and communication technologies offering academic programs while “using free-to-air satellite television broadcasts and the Internet” and the Information Technology University (ITU) which is nurturing “an environment of hightech research and entrepreneurship with its state-of-the-art facilities, world-class faculty, in-house startups incubator and well-established government and industry linkages,” Pakistan’s higher education landscape is certainly versatile.

The Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN), an initiative of the HEC, launched in 2002, is providing communication infrastructure to the 250 plus universities and institutes of higher learning, including colleges and research organizations of the country to meet their networking and internet requirements.

Whereas, as per the latest Pakistan Education Atlas, a staggering 46 percent of public sector primary schools (124,284 primary schools) in Pakistan are without electricity. The Pakistan Education Atlas, prepared by the federal government’s Academy of Educational Planning and Management (AEPAM) and UN World Food Program, was launched in September 2015. Besides many others, the country’s school education system is facing challenges of missing facilities. Luckily, most Pakistani universities do not face such challenges.

Scholarships galore

Presently, there are some 40,000 faculty members in public and private sector universities and DAIs of the country and only about 10,000 of them are PhDs which makes it a 25 percent of the total teaching strength in Pakistani universities.

After the establishment of the HEC, Pakistan witnessed a kind of ‘revolution’ in indigenous and foreign scholarships for MPhil and PhD programs both for the faculty members and the students.

The HEC, under its Faculty Development Program (FDP), has so far awarded 2,450 foreign scholarships, executed by universities and DAIs, with maximum 938 scholarships in the discipline of Engineering and Technology. These are followed by 493 scholarships in Physical Sciences and 431 in Social Sciences.

So far, the HEC has sent 7,806 Pakistani students under its Overseas Scholarships Program out of which 5,683 have returned while 2,123 are currently pursuing MPhil leading to PhD or PhD programs abroad. Those who have returned 1,874 scholars completed their studies in Biological and Medical Sciences, 1,406 in Physical Sciences and 979 in Engineering and Technology.

Of those who availed Overseas Scholarships, 1,341 were sent to United States, 1,226 to United Kingdom and 907 to Cuba.
Riaz Haq said…
Higher Education in Pakistan (Pakistan Economic Survey 2019-20


http://www.finance.gov.pk/survey/chapter_20/10_Education.pdf

vii) Degree Colleges (Classes XIII
An enrolment of 0.59 million students is expected during 2018
enrolment of 0.60 million in 2017
were functional during 2017-18.
of students to the professional and vocational
viii) Universities
There were 211 universities with 51.5 thousand teachers in both public and private sectors
functional during 2018-19, according to the data received from
Commission (HEC). The overall enrolment of students in higher education instituti
(universities) increased to 1.86 million in 2018
Overall Assessment
The overall education situation based on
institutes, and teachers, have shown a slight improvement. The total number of enrolments
during 2017-18 was recorded at 51.0 million as compared to 47.6 million during the same
period last year, which shows an increase of 7.1 percent. It is estimated to increase to
million during 2018-19. The number of institutes stood at 262.0 thousand during 2017
compared to 260.1 thousand during last year. However, the number of institutes is estimated
to increase to 266.3 thousand in
The number of teachers during 2017
million during the last year showing an improvement
is estimated to increase to 1.83 million during 2018
0
2500
5000
7500
10000
12500
15000
17500
20000
22500
2016-17 2017-18 P
(In thousand)
Fig-10.1: Enrolment at each level
0
200
400
600
800
2016-17
(In thousand)
Fig-10.3: Teachers at each level
Pakistan Economic Survey 2019-20
17. However, it is estimated to increase by 8.7 percent,
million to 0.47 million during 2018-19.
vii) Degree Colleges (Classes XIII-XIV)
An enrolment of 0.59 million students is expected during 2018-19 in degree colleges against
enrolment of 0.60 million in 2017-18. A total of 1,659 degree colleges with 41,233 teachers
18. The slight decline in enrollment might be due to preference
of students to the professional and vocational courses.
There were 211 universities with 51.5 thousand teachers in both public and private sectors
19, according to the data received from the Higher Education
Commission (HEC). The overall enrolment of students in higher education instituti
(universities) increased to 1.86 million in 2018-19 from 1.58 million in 2017-18.
Riaz Haq said…
There are about 10 million college graduates in Pakistan in 2020, according to Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.

About 7 million have a bachelor's degree and another 3 million have master's or PhDs.

https://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files//tables/EDUCATED%20POPULATION%20BY%20LEVEL%20OF%20EDUCATION.pdf
Riaz Haq said…
Quality higher education
By Atta-ur-Rahman December 08, 2021


https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/915013-quality-higher-education


The landscape of higher education changed dramatically between 2002 and 2008 so much so that Pakistan not only caught up with India but also overtook it in the year 2018. This is no small achievement as India had been investing in higher education since its very birth – this includes the visionary policies of Nehru who established the IITs and other good quality higher education institutions in the 1950s and 60s.

The single most important element that determines the quality of higher education is the quality of faculty. For this reason, when the HEC was set up in 2002 under my chairmanship, the highest priority was given to the training and recruitment of high-quality faculty in our universities.

After a rigorous screening process, some 11,000 students were sent to the world’s leading universities, and to attract them back on completion of their doctorate degrees, several important initiatives were introduced. First, a new contractual salary structure was introduced with the salaries of professors several times higher than that of federal ministers in the government. Second, students completing their PhD degrees could apply for research grants of up to $100,000 – one year before completion of their work.

Third, graduates would have jobs on arrival with the HEC paying the salary. Fourth, an excellent digital library was set up that provided free access to 65,000 journals and 25,000 textbooks through the Pakistan Educational Research Network (PERN) that connected all universities with high-speed internet. Fifth, free access to sophisticated instruments was provided. Sixth, grants were made available through a liberal research grants scheme – National Research Projects for Universities (NRPU) – to help young academics to win sizeable research funding. These and other such measures led to a 97.5 percent return rate of scholars.

To control plagiarism, specialised software was introduced, which controlled this problem to a great extent. However, this issue persists – to a small extent – both in India and Pakistan and other countries. According to an article published in 2019 in ‘Nature India’, 980 papers published by top Indian institutions, including those from the IITs, between 2000 and 2017, were fraudulent or plagiarised and had to be retracted. Between 2005 and 2021, 254 publications were also retracted from Pakistan. This is an average of 15 papers per year (about 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent retractions annually).

To promote blended education, a mirror website of the MIT Open Courseware was set up in 2005 when I was the HEC chairman, and many undergraduate computer science courses were downloaded, copied on CDs, and distributed to all universities. An exciting scheme for live distance education was also introduced by us with top professors delivering daily lectures which were listened to live and interactively across Pakistan. A major programme was initiated to attract our highly qualified Pakistan diaspora back to the country.

Some 600 eminent academicians returned and played a valuable role in uplifting the quality of higher education in the country. Split PhD programmes were introduced so that PhD students in Pakistan could do a split PhD with a part of their time being spent in good foreign universities under the supervision of eminent foreign scholars. Pakistan was soon recognised internationally for these efforts, and glowing tributes were paid in numerous articles written by the world’s leading educational authorities as well as by neutral experts of the British Council, World Bank, USAID, and UN. I was conferred the highest prize for institution-building by the World Academy of Sciences (Italy) and by the Austrian and Chinese governments.
Riaz Haq said…
Bilal I Gilani
@bilalgilani
Enrollment in university education now stagnant for some years

https://twitter.com/bilalgilani/status/1535720016800358405?s=20&t=oEJKy7c-hNFbhP6zXIid_Q
Riaz Haq said…
Higher Education enrollment in India (41.4 million) is much higher than Pakistan (3.04 million) in 2020-21.

However the rate of growth over the last 5 years in higher education enrollment in Pakistan (12% since 2019-20, 134% since 2014-15) is much faster than in India (7.5% since 2019-20, 21% since 2014-15).

Sources: AISHI India and HEC Pakistan


https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1894517#:~:text=Since%202014%2D15%2C%20there%20has,1.88%20crore%20in%202019%2D20.

https://www.hec.gov.pk/english/universities/hes/Pages/HEDR-Statistics.aspx
Riaz Haq said…
Tertiary Education in Pakistan:

The survey further indicates there were approximately 500,000 students enrolled in technical & vocational education, approximately 760,000 in degree-awarding colleges, and 1.96 million students in universities in 2020-21.Nov 10, 2022

https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/pakistan-education#:~:text=The%20survey%20further%20indicates%20there,in%20universities%20in%202020%2D21.

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