The reality of Pakistani higher education

Harsh truths about higher education

Dr Salman Shah, the financial advisor to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, agrees that the state of education is poor, as he stated at a conference on poverty reduction in Lahore on Saturday.

And it is not just Pakistanis who are aware of the poor state of higher education. Stephen Cohen, a leading American expert on South Asia, made some revealing extempore comments about this subject at a launch ceremony for his book on Pakistan.

Cohen said that he had heard about the government’s higher education reforms, particularly its efforts to churn out more PhDs. However, after visiting Punjab University and speaking with its PhD students, he was dismayed by their level of competency.

“After interviewing PhD students, I thought America should triple the higher education grant to Pakistan,” he said, and called for an immediate crash aid programme from the US to improve the situation.

He lamented the decline in teaching standards, particularly at Punjab University. In the 1970s, Punjab University was fairly average, but it had some decent teachers, he said. But then, the worst students of those decent teachers became the teachers of the next batch of students. Now it seemed that the university faculty was populated by the worst students of that next batch of pupils.