Resetting higher education imbalance

Go to any campus, meet representatives of teachers or students and you will find that panic reigns supreme. The budget is upon us and it has made drastic cuts for higher education. During President Pervez Musharraf era, a team of dedicated educationists set up Higher Education Commission (HEC) and Pakistani scholars and students proved their metal, producing quality research and launching meaningful thematic research programmes.

But all along, some saner voices kept on raising the concern that this boom is actually a bubble that will bust at some time. Education was not taken for a means to achieve something. Some incompetent people misused this opportunity to impose their monopolies and worked as mafia, churning out fake research and getting hold of higher education institutions. Quality was sacrificed at the cost of quantity and hence the day came that the government resources drained and it had to cut education budget by about forty to fifty percent.

To make sense of the things, Prof Aliya Hashmi Khan, member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC) told me that higher education is a costly business. Asked about the estimations that at least Rs10 to Rs12 thousands increase in university semester fees is inevitable after the cut in higher education budget, she explained that when this segment is priced, its demand will decline.

She said growth in higher education was not sustainable. This sector, she said, was expanded without proper planning and now the government is going to reset the balance. Too many universities were opened that are unable to bear their cost, she said.

She said the loss making departments will fade out. All over the world, there is a linkage between industry and education and we in Pakistan will have to explore this linkage, she asserted. Asked if it means that social sciences will bear the brunt of budget cut, Prof Khan said not necessarily. But some departments of arts and humanities will definitely suffer. About the young students, she said that they will go to entrepreneurship other than persisting in higher education.

It has been witnessed that a lot of people are doing MS and PhDs without any consumption in the market. So the situation demands some rationale measures so that we are able to offer our youth a useful future, she said.

Prof Khan has been dean of faculty of social sciences at Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU). Faculty members still remember her tenure which is counted as a golden period in the university’s history.

All the same, the HEC chairman has publically expressed his opinion that this cut will greatly affect the higher education growth. When the fees will increase, chances for the poor to get good degrees will diminish. The mafia of professors that have put down their suckers on universities will let the agitators loose. Student bodies will resist rising fees as they did at the time of the outgoing QAU VC. The government needs to keep all these issues into consideration as admissions for next semesters are open. Pure economics does not work without profound political insight in public affairs, not least when it involves youth of the country.

— Hassan Shehzad