The next 50 years or Student output – its extrapolation and impact on our future
In the course of my meandering search for Pakistani datasets, I came across the HEC website where I found to my surprise that:
- We produce about 150,000 students every year from our nationwide University system.
- The actual number was 118,000 in 2004 and projecting growth for 2005, 2006 and 2007 at the prior three year rate of 10% per annum, the end result is about 156,000 in 2007.
- This includes about 104,000 undergraduate students, about 45,000 graduate students and the rest would be classified as MPhils, PhD’s and Post graduate Diploma holders.
- The best part is that about 16,000 of these came from private universities – which can be read either ways, I will just read it positively especially since this segment is growing at about 30% a year, year on year.
- If you carry the growth forward 4 years, you are looking about 180,000 students coming out, with about 30,000 graduates out of private universities by 2011.
Put this in context. You are adding about a million educated youth to the workforce every 5 years. You can question their education, and their standard and their ability to earn a living, but compare this to Dubai, Doha, London and/or Singapore who have to go to all sorts of lengths to attract this level/profile of educated expat immigration over a five year period. We get it for free.
We may not do much with it but it is still ours.
So if you actually had someone crazy enough to dream that they could fix the education system of this country and it is not that impossible a dream, imagine what you could do with this base. This is not an NP-Hard problem. In about 10 years you can fix the issue end to end and start seeing real impact where a local graduate is functional and skilled in his professed subject.
Extrapolate that, and in about 50 years, or one generation, you would have added about 60 million educated voters and their children to your vote bank. And since you are educating faster than you are breeding, you will ultimately cross over to an educated society, versus an ignorant one.
Our current generation of outdated, hopeless, corrupt and ugly politicians will be dead, dying or buried six feet under the ground. All we need to do is hang on and stick it out for another generation and you will not recognize this place. I now get why the late Eqbal Ahmed was so optimistic about our society…
Yes, no, maybe…
I am game.
Light up the darkness Predictions for 2008
7 Responses to “The next 50 years or Student output – its extrapolation and impact on our future”
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Translator
I strongly disagree with the analysis, with all due respect of course. Here are the reasons why.
Firstly, the numbers put forward by the HEC do not have as much credibility as they would like people to think. The numbers that come up on the website are compiled through information sent by accredited universities. Much like ghost schools, there are ghost universities that have been accredited by the HEC even though they do not exist – fact not fiction. The greater the number of students these universities show as having graduated, the greater their ranking within the HEC system and the greater the grant package that can be afforded to them. Not to say that the numbers are completely flawed, but they are bloated at the very least.
You’ve addressed the question of education a numbers game supplemented by the quality of the students. However any and every measure for higher education is firstly quality and secondly numbers. The numbers game was played by higher education commission authorities in Iran as well and has been deemed to be a failure by most. Infact, to the best of my knowledge, a number of Iranian chemists took on Dr Atta’s numbers’ policies of higher education in the Nature journal.
Higher education products are not a means within themselves and can hardly transform society individually – primary education and the job market are two other equally important sectors. Without access to quality primary education, the quality of of a vast quantity of post-graduates will never rise above a certain threshold. When the HEC started its out its program for overseas scholarships, it didnt have enough candidates because hardly anyone cleared the internal merit cutoffs. In order to keep up the numbers, primary education reform wasnt carried out, but the cutoffs were lowered. Without going into the details of it, the effect of substandard Phd’s is suffocating to the educational system of any country. Granted there are many private institutions offering quality primary education, but those are only for a select few and are exceptions rather than examples.
As for quality higher education institutes across Pakistan, the story is slightly different. According to a paper by Dr Saad Shafqat, around 90-95% of the graduating batch of AKU proceeds to the US, of which only a very small minority immigrates back. The simple reason – lack of proper renumeration and professional job environment i.e. the job market. LUMS too produces mostly business oriented graduates which are rented out to the highest paying multi-national organization at home or abroad. Yes exceptions do exist, but they are again exceptions at most.
When countries like Dubai look to attract expats, the candidate needs to go through a rigourous quality check – not everyone gets through. But when you are grooming substandard graduates in your own country, you need to provide employment for all because they are a product of your own system.
As for brain-drain, AKU has been producing quality doctors long before the HEC came into being, yet Pakistan still faces an acute shortage of good doctors. Just looking at the facts and figures of the percentage of AKU doctors actually practising in Pakistan would be eye-opening.
Its not a question of just waiting out a couple of generations. Yes we are educating faster than we are reproducing – but the key point to remember is that the corrupt politicians are reproducing as well. We are still being ruled by the same families of politicians from the Zia era, so I doubt waiting around would gain any fruit.
Its not that I’m a pessimist, I’m always an optimist but I’m a realist as well. Unless we go through a 10 year period of extensive land and education reforms, its unwise to gamble much on the impact of higher education in the country.
We have both, a very optimist and a very pessimist version of the same story here. However, i’ll pose a few queries to Naveed.
Apart from the fact that people generally do not believe anything the govt. says or does, what other proof do you have of HEC’s inefficiency? i’ve seen first hand the HEC dealing with Bahria University, while a cousin has been directly involved between HEC and FDJC, and to say the least, these people are not the bozo’s we think them to be.
True, the govt. sector has many loopholes and not every piece of data might be truthful, but with the amount of resources present, they’re doing a pretty decent job.
Numbers, carry with them an inherent flaw of being meaningless in certain situations, but if you had noticed jawwads first line of the post “In the course of my meandering search for Pakistani datasets…” DATA ON PAKISTAN DOES NOT EXIST IN THE KIND AND FORM YOU EXPECT COMING FROM THE STATES. So if someone has done the effort, it should be lauded and be built upon rather than being torn down and done again.
Mansoor, thanks for the comment. Let me try to set the record straight as much as possible.
My father and sister both teach at higher education institutes affiliated with the HEC. They have witnessed first hand the problems of inflated numbers. Also, it might not be surprising to know that there are individuals that have received university charters while the universities under question do not exist except on paper. Taking names only tarnishes reputations and whereas I’m just making a point here so I will not indulge in that.
As for myself, I am one of the earlier HEC scholars to be sent abroad for Phd studies. Through our extensive interaction with the HEC machinery, it becomes pretty obvious that the strategies made are short-sighted. While one may obviously suggest that I’m biting the hand that feeds me, I’m merely providing criticism of existing procedures so that they may be bettered.
As of now the HEC policies are those of grandeur – they seem to be more preoccupied with making fancy plans rather than smaller feasible ones that stand a higher rate of success. If you are following the case of the 9 universities to be set up with the help of EU countries then you would understand. The university model is based on the IIT’s of India, however the project of overly ambitious – a fact pointed out initially by Pervez Hoodbhoy. It was suggested that instead of the 9, focus should be on setting up 1 or 2 with foreign help. The suggestion was denied, the net result being the first of the 9 universities which was supposed to be setup last year has still not seen the light of day. Giving the geo-political situation of the country, it seems unlikely that the university will be setup anytime before the mid of the year is up.
There are other examples of flawed policy as well. The HEC introduced a scheme wherein each academic is paid an amount for every paper published and every graduate student supervised. The academic community resisted the policy saying that it would have serious ramifications, however it was carried out. The result of that policy is that there has been a significant rise in ghost phd’s and plagiarism. The most prominent case being that of the head of department at Punjab University. I go can on about how the lack of proper feasible plans has haunted the HEC and how it will continue to haunt it.
Developing countries around the world have now realized that investing in science alone is to expensive an ask – so they are going for specialization. India and China are both going for computational biological sciences to help with the drug development process. Giving their expertise in computational sciences, its not such a major investment. HEC on the other hand has announced that it seeks to specialize within Nanotechnology and the Experimental Life Sciences. Now anyone that is even remotely affiliated with any of these two fields knows that a) they are really expensive programs to fund in the short and longer term and b) the barrier to entry for these sciences is extremely high. While on paper it looks incredible to say that we will be focusing on nanotech and the biological sciences, in essence its an unfeasible project that in all probability will result in the loss of a lot of the tax payers money.
No one here is debating that higher education is bad. But criticism of the system does not imply pessimism. Its just a mechanism of keeping law and policy makers honest.
In conclusion I don’t buy the argument that data on Pakistan does not exist or that we have meager resources. The Citizens Foundation has built an excellent primary school system across regions spanning from urban centers to rural areas. Their success lies in simplicity and the lack of compromise on excellence. They gather and maintain their own data and transparent accounting practices mean that they are not subject to as much suspicion of HEC produced figures. Whens the last time an independent body audited the accounts of the HEC and the results were made public? And in a day and age where telecommunication has penetrated nearly every region of the country, it doesnt take a lot of resources to effectively manage scattered institutions. All it takes are proper policies which are not out of line with reality.
[...] Student output and its extrapolation [...]
[...] Student output and its extrapolation [...]
Jawwad, this is not a response to your post but to the blog as a whole. It’s just lovely to see optimism in the doom and gloom, and a contrarian view based on something solid. I forward your stuff all over the place. Met an old friend last night, she’s Indian married to a Pakistani (they’re based in London) and she’s the latest recipient. Also: she probably reads exclusively “The Economist, WSJ and the rest of the world media”…any suggestions for what I/she could read for a reasoned contrarian view?…Thank you and please keep blogging!
Thank you Govind… Kind words are always much appreciated… Working on an alternate for a while, I would suggest FinanceTrainingCourse.com, Jehanara.wordpress.com and Techlahore.com for a change. And if she is on Facebook my distribution channel ala my page at http://www.facebook.com/Jawwad.Farid