IN civilised societies, governments support research students by offering them scholarships, stipends and student loans that boost the number of postgraduate and doctorate candidates annually. However, it seems, public-sector universities across Pakistan are busy in making every effort to prevent students from participating in contemporary research and academic endeavours.

As such, a living and vivid example of this attitude is the move by the University of Karachi to increase the fees of MPhil as well as PhD programmes across all its academic faculties by up to 90 per cent. Similarly, fee for entry tests, admission, thesis evaluation, and viva examination have all gone upward for these academic programmes.

The fee of MPhil programmes in various faculties ranged between Rs38,500 and Rs44,000 per semester in the prospectus the university had issued in 2023. However, the corresponding values in the 2024 prospectus are Rs65,000 and Rs100,000. For all the PhD programmes, the semester fee has been increased from Rs80,000 to Rs120,000 in various departments. The revised fee structure now is almost similar to what one comes across at private institutions anywhere in the country.

On their part, private universities in the city have modern infrastructure, air-conditioned classrooms as well as modern educational technology. In contrast, at the University of Karachi, the exact opposite is true, except for a few depart- ments that have independently prevented themselves from being totally destroyed.

Dawar Shoaib
Karachi

Published in Dawn, August 25th, 2024