The Undergraduate Education Policy, introduced by Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission in 2023, represents an ambitious attempt to standardise and reform undergraduate education across the country. Designed for both associate (2-year) and bachelor (4-5 year) degree programmes, the policy aims to transition higher education from a content-heavy, rote-learning approach to one rooted in competency-based learning and real-world applicability. The UGEP sets out to enhance student success through a structured framework emphasising conceptual understanding, soft skills, professional ethics, interpersonal competencies and job market preparedness.

At the core of the UGEP are certain key objectives: fostering interdisciplinary learning while maintaining subject specialisation; integrating applied knowledge and entrepreneurship; and developing creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving capabilities. Undergraduate degrees are positioned as terminal qualifications, although pathways for further education remain available. The framework delineates a fixed structure comprising 30 credit hours of general education, a minimum of 72 credit hours in a major discipline, 12 credit hours of interdisciplinary courses and 3 credit hours each for field internships and a capstone project. Associate degrees focus on early workforce entry and span 60-72 credit hours over two years.

One of the underlying tensions in the implementation of the UGEP is in the disproportionate centralisation of authority by the HEC. While universities in Pakistan are autonomous entities with their own charters, senates (in some cases) and syndicates—bodies entrusted with academic governance and intellectual stewardship—the HEC often assumes a prescriptive role, issuing uniform guidelines and curricular structures that leave little room for institutional innovation or contextual adaptability. This approach treats universities like secondary schools, reducing their function to mere implementers of centrally determined frameworks, rather than nurturing grounds for intellectual exploration and academic freedom.

This tendency not only dilutes the academic capital embedded within individual institutions but also marginalises the higher goals traditionally associated with a university education. Absent from the UGEP’s documentation is a deeper philosophical vision of education as the pursuit of knowledge and truth that aspires to elevate the individual toward wisdom, self-awareness and moral integrity. The antidote to the self-alienation that is quite rampant in Pakistani society lies in the revitalisation of the humanities.

Teaching humanities is vital as this nurtures a deeper understanding of the human condition and fosters a sense of shared identity and purpose. It is therefore highly recommended to emphasise the teaching of classical knowledge. For the pursuit of truth, freedom holds centrality, and to safeguard freedom, the justice system ought to be impeccable. This line of thinking is conspicuously absent in the prescribed agenda of the HEC. Instead, the policy is narrowly utilitarian, focused predominantly on employability and market alignment. While these aims are valid, they should not come at the expense of the broader purpose of higher education: to cultivate critically reflective, ethically responsible and socially conscientious citizens.

As alluded before, universities ought to be spaces where young people are empowered to ask fundamentally significant questions—about human existence, justice, ethics, society and the nature of truth. This intellectual curiosity is not only central to liberal education but also vital in shaping a citizenry capable of democratic engagement and ethical reasoning. The formation of a law-abiding, cohesive society requires more than job-ready graduates; it demands individuals who recognise their interconnectedness with others, who value pluralism and thus are equipped to engage constructively with difference.

In countries like Pakistan, where fissiparous tendencies—regional, ethnic, and ideological—threaten national cohesion, the role of universities becomes even more critical. They must not function only as vocational training centres but as civic laboratories where students learn to reconcile competing narratives, confront historical complexities and develop a sense of shared belonging. Yet, such goals are scarcely articulated in the UGEP. Civic education under the policy is often reduced to state-centric ideology, lacking the openness and pluralism necessary to foster deep democratic values. What if teaching of regional languages is made compulsory, requiring learning languages of other regions?

The absence of these higher objectives from national education policies reveals a gap between the form and the spirit of educational reform. While the UGEP introduces much-needed structural changes—credit-hour systems, capstone projects and soft-skills development—it fails to articulate an intellectual and moral vision for the undergraduate journey. A more holistic and humanistic approach would embed courses in philosophy, literature, comparative ethics and political theory, and allow greater curricular autonomy for universities to craft programmes that respond to their unique social and historical contexts.

Despite these conceptual limitations, the UGEP’s emphasis on 21st-Century competencies, such as ethics, communication and interdisciplinary exposure, aligns it with global academic trends. It also offers much-needed structural coherence to a previously fragmented tertiary education system and introduces flexibility through exit options with associate credentials. The formal inclusion of capstone projects and field experience signals an effort to bridge academia with industry.

However, the UGEP faces significant implementation challenges. A core issue is the misalignment between policy vision and institutional readiness—many universities lack the trained faculty, administrative infrastructure and pedagogical tools required for competency-based education. Furthermore, the assessment frameworks remain largely traditional, undermining the policy’s competency-oriented ethos. Industry linkages, though mentioned, are weak or underdeveloped, limiting the relevance and employability of graduates. Additionally, the rigid structure of general education may restrict student agency and interdisciplinary exploration, especially in comparison to more modular systems seen globally.

When benchmarked against systems in Singapore and other developed countries, the UGEP exhibits both conceptual alignment and structural lag. Singapore’s higher education policies, for instance, are evidence-driven, agile and tightly integrated with national skill needs and industry forecasts. In contrast, the UGEP, while visionary, remains bureaucratic and slow to adapt.

The UGEP seeks in principle to promote competency-based learning. Countries like Singapore, the United States and Germany implement it through robust assessment tools, industry-aligned learning outcomes and faculty development centres. Interdisciplinary education in Pakistan is confined to 12 credit hours of “allied” courses, whereas top-tier universities such as NUS or MIT offer flexible, modular majors, fostering deeper cross-disciplinary integration. Capstone projects in developed contexts are often co-designed with industry, mentored intensively and incubated into start-ups—a support structure largely absent in Pakistani institutions.

Language and communication education also differ significantly. The UGEP includes expository writing and English language instruction, yet stops short of offering advanced academic communication training, such as critical writing labs or presentation clinics, common in global institutions. Moreover, while Pakistan’s curriculum includes ICT training, the actual integration of EdTech tools, such as adaptive learning platforms or AI-driven analytics, remains underutilised. Civic education and ethical reasoning are part of the UGEP, but lack the global citizenship orientation embedded in liberal arts models found in countries like Canada or the Netherlands.

Perhaps the most telling divergence lies in graduate employability. While the UGEP aspires to prepare students for the labour market, its industry-academia collaboration remains superficial. Developed countries often maintain tight feedback loops with employers, enabling them to constantly refine curricula, internship programmes and research agendas. Furthermore, the absence of faculty development mechanisms in the UGEP leaves a critical gap. In contrast, countries like Singapore invest in ongoing pedagogical training, often through dedicated centres such as the Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning

To enhance the effectiveness and global relevance of Pakistan’s Undergraduate Education Policy, targeted reforms are essential. These include establishing a dynamic, continuously updated curriculum responsive to evolving economic and employment trends; forging strong industry partnerships to co-develop internships, capstones and course content; institutionalising faculty development through dedicated teaching excellence centres; integrating educational technology via national platforms that support blended learning and data-driven assessments; expanding student autonomy by modularising general education for greater interdisciplinary flexibility; and implementing robust, discipline-wide outcome evaluation frameworks to measure critical thinking, ethical reasoning and problem-solving skills.

Moreover, to move beyond bureaucratic compliance, the UGEP must embed a richer conception of education—one that emphasises not just professional readiness but also moral imagination, pluralistic inquiry and civic responsibility. Only then can Pakistan’s universities reclaim their role as spaces of genuine learning, critical reflection and nation-building.

The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.