It is the height of the summer and monsoon season, and it has been very quiet lately on the education front, allowing me to pull back on the frequency of op-ed writing.
The news that is receiving some column space is the appointment of a new chair of the Higher Education Commission (HEC). After two discrete tenures and a one-year extension, the outgoing chairman’s last day at the job was July 29. Hopeful candidates, including some old horses, are throwing their hats in the ring, some by dropping tactically timed op-eds, while others are lobbying for themselves in influential quarters.
Note that, while the chair’s tenure has now expired, the process of finding a replacement got underway only late last month, when someone finally woke up and constituted an eight-member search committee to find a successor, led by the minister of federal education and professional training (MoFEPT) and including a minister of state, two secretaries and two senior academics.
Key positions in government either remain vacant or in the hands of acting appointees, sometimes for prolonged periods of time because government offices have yet to master the dark art of using a calendar. Instead of starting the search process just before or after a tenure ends, maybe set a reminder six months before to get the process started in a timely manner? And so it is that on July 29, a notification was issued by the MoFEPT that its secretary would serve as the acting chairperson of the HEC for the next three months.
I cannot recall the last time any important office in Rawalpindi remained vacant for longer than it needed to be, but that seems to have become the norm everywhere else in government, reflecting priorities, in this case, in education.
That makes this an appropriate time to look at where the HEC stands today - things that should have been sorted out a long time ago but continue to be neglected and things that receive attention but make observers question its priorities.
The list of services and activities in which the HEC is involved is extensive. Its stated mission is “Facilitating Institutes of Higher Learning to serve as an Engine of Growth for the Socio-Economic Development of Pakistan”. The number of university graduates grew from approximately 300,000 in 2001 to approximately two million in 2023. Purely in terms of numbers, the access piece is being addressed.
The other piece is raising the quality of higher education for every person in the country who wants it. Setting standards and accrediting institutions and programs are core to this mission. Supporting the establishment and resourcing of new institutions of higher learning and enabling students lacking the means through scholarships are core functions supporting access. One could argue that collectively bargaining access to resources like online libraries, research publications, and training programmes (eg, Coursera) on behalf of all universities, assessing the equivalence of foreign degrees and some other functions also fall into one of those buckets.
However, over the years, the HEC has been experiencing mission creep and now finds itself involved in internship programmes, laptop distribution schemes, delivering career planning workshops, CV and interview prep sessions, communication skills, university staff training etc. A very pertinent and recent example was the unveiling of a hologram of the HEC chair at an event titled ‘Pakistan Digital Leap’ (The News International, ‘HEC takes leap in digitisation, July 27, 2025’).
These are not the responsibilities of a regulator but of universities. Regulators set expectations and define KPIs, then let universities take ownership of the task and work as 200+ labs, each developing the right approach for its context. The HEC has been involved in activities of secondary and tertiary relevance. At the same time, its core mission drowns in the noise, instead of ensuring timely replacement of its chairperson, lobbying and securing necessary budgetary support for public universities, tracking (and publishing) outputs of universities that matter to students (graduate employability, rather than faculty publication counts) come to mind.
For the last few years, successive governments have been claiming to champion the cause of higher education while maintaining the freeze on the higher education budget (in rupee terms) since 2017. We have an MoFEPT that eagerly injected itself to make the HEC subservient to itself, but whose bureaucrats (generally lacking formal training in higher education) are clueless about the sector. And, consequently, we have HEC chairs whose sole objective it becomes to stay in the good graces of everyone at the MoFEPT.
Sprinkle some short-termism on top – governments planning with three-year time horizons, bureaucrats looking for quick wins during the 2-3 year tenures and HEC chairs and VCs hired to please and always looking for their next gig – and you get what we have today: Too many distracting shiny objects and a lack of bandwidth and interest to work towards the core mission and addressing the unglamorous nuts-and-bolts problems that would actually make a difference.
For instance, one service of the HEC that most people with a university education must avail themselves of is to have their degree attested to verify its authenticity. This has been a requirement for immigration applications, scholarship applications, admissions processes at foreign universities, employment abroad, some types of visa applications, but also for domestic purposes such as running for elected office and increasingly even to land a job in the country.
Sooner or later, every university graduate in Pakistan has to visit the HEC and get this done for one reason or another. Based on estimates from a few years back, hundreds of people submit degree attestation applications every day. It is reasonable to assume that the number has increased further since then.
In 2016, someone I know went through the HEC’s degree equivalence and attestation processes for foreign and local degrees as a precondition to accept a job abroad and get a work visa. The process at that time was a tedious, bureaucratic and time-consuming ordeal, and, after seeking help from the executive director, took about seven weeks to complete.
This year, I again had the opportunity to witness someone else go through the same process. After nine years, applicants can now apply for their degree attestation through courier services and no longer have to travel halfway across the country to Islamabad and fight to get one of the limited 150 daily tokens available at 7am. However, every other part of the process remains unchanged. In fact, it can now take even longer than before to get a degree attested.
This is just one example of an in-house service that the HEC has been providing to an estimated tens of thousands of people every year for over a decade, that needs fixing and could be addressed by making internal changes to procedures, not requiring an act of parliament. Yet, here we are. Is this the best that is possible?
During the pandemic, all countries faced the same challenge of issuing vaccination certificates that can be easily authenticated. Virtually overnight, many countries converged to a similar solution: Put vaccination records online and print their URLs as QR codes on vaccination certificates. Anyone in the world wishing to authenticate a vaccination certificate just had to scan the QR code and check if the data on the presented certificate matches the record visible online.
Something similar could have been done for university degrees and transcripts. The HEC could start maintaining a record of graduates from accredited programmes at accredited higher education institutions (HEIs). When universities issue their graduates their degrees and transcripts, they could include a QR code that could link to students’ online records to verify the information on documents.
Someone more technically literate than me that I spoke to suggested using a ‘consortium blockchain’ with restricted write access for HEC-recognised universities and public read access for anyone else. Such an arrangement could also solve another problem: the elimination of fake, backdated degrees, but we are stuck with a process that would be at home in the previous century.
The HEC must urgently refocus on its core mission. The quality aspect in higher education is an especially hard one that almost every country is grappling with. Making headway will require a departure from the kind of short-term decision-making that the present setup encourages, asking aspiring HEC chairpersons (and VCs) to present concrete plans that strive to achieve during their tenure and then giving them the time and leeway to execute on those plans. In the meantime, leave peripheral initiatives to other offices of the government.
The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.