HEC chairman for preparing youth to cope with future challenges

Islamabad: Higher Education Commission (HEC) Chairman Dr Mukhtar Ahmad Monday stressed the need for preparing youth to cope with challenges, which would face by the country in future.

He was addressing here the opening ceremony of a two-day International Conference on Professional Development in Higher Education: Trends and Practices, Prospects and Innovations as a chief guest.

The conference was arranged by the Higher Education Commission (HEC), in collaboration with Fatima Jinnah Women University (FJWU). Dr Mahmood-ul-Hassan Butt, Consultant HEC presented a keynote address while Dr Samina Amin Qadir, Vice Chancellor, FJWU, Rawalpindi, Mrs. Shaheen Khan, Adviser Learning Innovation, HEC, Fida Hussain, Director General LI, HEC and a large number of faculty members and professionals attended the event.

In his message on this occasion, Dr Mukhtar Ahmed urged teachers to ensure character building of students and teach them social values and ethics. He added that apart from imparting education, it was also a responsibility of teachers to groom students.

He said HEC took a number of initiatives under its Faculty Development Programme in order to build capacity of universities faculty. He revealed that HEC envisions 40 per cent of PhD faculty by 2025. In his keynote address, Dr. Mahmood-ul-Hassan Butt shed light on salient trends and practices, prospects and innovations that had been incorporated in the higher education sector since the inception of HEC.

He also shared the strategic priorities HEC had set for the future to continue the journey of progress and qualitative improvement of an integrated education system in the country. He said the founding fathers of HEC believed that the higher education systems led in the relentless pursuit of quality of instruction, utilizing available knowledge and discovery of new knowledge, competencies and skills by preparing creative, critical, constructive and communicative scholars.

He said the HEC policies guided towards numerical expansion of institutions from 59 universities in 2002 to 188 universities currently. Informing the audience about the highlights of roadmap outlined under the Higher Education Vision 2025, Dr Butt said a three-tier integrated system of tertiary education had been devised.