HEC funding

In May, reports surfaced that the federal government was planning to cut the HEC budget by half and bring it to Rs30 billion from the existing Rs65.25 billion. The planning division rejected such claims only after it met with severe criticism. Reassurances by the ministers for education and planning gave some hope but now come reports suggest that the HEC is likely to receive Rs42 billion in the budget. If this turns out to be true, the HEC will see an alarming 35 per cent cut in its funding. Given the soaring inflation, the actual impact of this cut will be far more severe. When the new government assumed power in April, there was some hope that – among other things – the education sector would also be saved from the devastating policies and steps the previous PTI-led government had initiated. But the government is hardly showing any solid commitment to retract those missteps. From the highly controversial Single National Curriculum (SNC) to the reported cut in funding to public-sector universities, the vibes have not been encouraging. While the government has said it will not be reducing higher education funding to Rs30 billion, the fact is that higher education already works with low budgets and infrastructural challenges. Since 2018, when the inflationary trend in the country displayed a runaway surge, the funding cuts to higher education have brought universities under stress. For many years now, our governments have been unable or unwilling to cover the expenses of both new and old universities.

Multiple governments in the past have tried to follow the neoliberal policy of forcing universities to increase tuition fees to become self-financed. But there is a limit to how much increase students in public-sector universities can afford. Universities are incurring additional expenditures due to high inflation and increasing energy costs and have been unable to expand facilities and extend existing ones uninterrupted to students and teachers. Cost-push factors are clear, and the government forcing further cuts would lead to a chaotic situation. Government assistance plays a significant role in public-sector universities as they cater to the needs of students coming from a relatively lower socioeconomic strata. Some universities have not been able to pay pensions in time. Many universities have found themselves in a position where they have no option but to unfreeze emergency funds. Under these circumstances, the government must reconsider its priorities and put on hold all new universities that the previous government had announced to establish by public funding.

In the past four years, dozens of new universities have been announced and even established across the country, while the allocation for higher education has been curtailed. The first priority should be to reduce the financial crunch that most universities are facing at the moment. The estimated amount our universities need just to sustain themselves is at least around Rs100 billion. Politicians love to throw around fancy words such as ‘human capital’, ‘learning organizations’, and ‘knowledge economy’, while continuing to play around with the future of young people. They must realize that the ‘growth’ they aim for is unlikely to materialize without adequate funding to education, including at the tertiary and higher levels.