Learning achievement in Urdu, Sindhi, and Math at 5th grade level in most provinces and districts has gone down in the 2023 survey
I hope and pray that AI revolution does not become latest one in which we are relegated to end users of other people’s labour
I reviewed manifestos of three major parties – PML-N, PPP, and PTI – that have held power at some points in past
Escalating situation by responding with physical violence and inviting violence in turn
I put down some of my thoughts on issue last year in an op-ed in these pages Are Pakistanis really leaving September 8, 2023
How, you may wonder, are changes in household spending in the US relevant to us here in Pakistan?
Sayre’s law, named for Columbia University political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre, states that “The politics of the university are so intense...
I asked 12 year-old Sultan to read from his Urdu textbook. He struggled to read a simple sentence . While he eventually read the sentence, he could...
The image shows a workplace in the US. — AFP FileA few months ago, these pages carried an op-ed of mine that attempted to provide some insights...
A picture taken from Israel's southern city of Sderot shows rockets fired from Gaza towards Israel on October 28, 2023. — AFPSince Israel began...
A person can be seen making hand gestures while speaking in a professional setting. — Unsplash/FileWhen you become aware of a problem, you can...
Around the world, universities have multiple goals. Core among them remains teaching in degree programmes to pass on knowledge, make young adults...
Fall, the time when millions of students all over the world – including Pakistan – will start their college journeys, is upon us. Many will be...
A few weeks ago, the caretaker prime minister’s soundbite about educated Pakistanis who choose to settle abroad attracted public ire.Coming so...
A few weeks ago, A-level students in Pakistan and the region received their grades for the May/June 2023 exam session. The results came as a shock...
Public universities are facing multiple challenges that we keep hearing about, ranging in nature from academic, administrative, managerial,...
At the beginning of this year, I contributed an op-ed about how in its waning days, members of the Punjab Assembly went on a university charter...
What happens when you put a man in charge of a university, grant him virtually unchecked power over staff and faculty who in turn have unchecked...
I recently had the opportunity to visit Incheon in South Korea’s greater Seoul area. I spent time at the Incheon Global Campus, a global education...
The vast majority of 240-odd universities in the country are failing both of their missions: the idealistic goal of learning for learning’s sake,...
Today’s university vice-chancellors are facing a number of challenges. The number one challenge by far that universities are grappling with,...
I was on a road trip to the northern areas with friends. We were at a rest stop, our black off-road utility vehicle parked on the side of the road,...
Some people like superhero movies while others prefer horror movies. My favourite category of movies are tales of founders of companies that built...
International applicants to post-graduate programmes at universities in developed countries have long understood that having even a single...
The visuals coming out of Pakistan over the last week were jarring and alarming. Uncertainty is reigning. In the face of the tyranny of the urgent,...
Large Language Models , the guts of chatbots like ChatGPT, are having their moment right now. The rise of chatbots has brought forth numerous...
Every Pakistani aspires to the fruits of progress although many insist on continuing to live in the 16th century. Our state is too preoccupied with...
The Google /Oxford Languages dictionary definition of the adjective ‘liberal’ is: “willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different...
One of the most famous legends in Greek mythology is that of the escape of Daedalus, a gifted architect and craftsman, and his son Icarus from the...
On the evening of January 27, 1967 the Apollo 1 crew was performing a test rehearsal on the pad at Launch Complex 34 when a spark from a power surge...
Human migration has been happening since the dawn of time — in search of game, in search of fertile land. If it had not been for migration, the...
The year 2001 saw the release of Steven Spielberg’s film ‘A.I. - Artificial Intelligence’. It was accompanied by a website featuring a...
A 2020 report by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics , titled ‘State of graduate unemployment in Pakistan’, put the unemployment...
The game is afoot in Punjab. The Punjab Higher Education Commission is the provincial cousin of the Higher Education Commission in Islamabad....
This is a year-end review of the most important events in the education sector in 2022 and a forecast of how some of those issues will continue to...
In 2021, the PTI government embarked on an effort to cut down the authority of the chairman of the HEC of the time. On paper, the effort looked like...
The Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training is preparing to interview applicants for the position of Vice-chancellor for three...
In my last op-ed on the issue of the attempted land grab of Quaid-e-Azam University to build a bypass road I opined that it is a convenient path...
Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of...
These days, if you talk to anyone in government about any new program or initiative, really anything that will cost money, the response is often the...
There is an ancient view of the world according to which the Earth was a flat disk. That disk had to be supported by something. So, it was imagined...
I was recently talking to a faculty member, a fellow Gen-Xer, at a major UK university and he shared an observation he made at the start of the new...
Fall is upon us and at many universities around the world that means the beginning of yet another academic year. A few days ago, I was talking on...
Writing about education issues in our country is taxing, because much of it boils down to identifying a lot of shortcomings, bad priorities and poor...
Universities and policymakers need to revise their understanding of who their students are and understand their most pressing needs
Over the last 15 years, in most years, annual export growth of the IT & ITES sector has been solidly in the double digits
The HEC has been in turmoil since its last chairman proved himself non-pliant to the whims and wishes of the chairman of a task force in the PM...
Light travels at a finite speed of 300,000km per seconds – the speed of light. Because the speed is finite, every photon in every ray of light...