Illustration: Nashmia Shah
A vast majority of development projects in higher education focus on building infrastructure and jobs. And since the creation of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002 there have been thousands of them. So much so, that it is now argued that the focus on job creation has become the primary output of the HEC and not a by-product of organising a better education system.
Yet the HEC has been cited as a prime example of how reform of moribund and unproductive ministries should be undertaken in Pakistan. In the first five years of its existence (2002-2007), the HEC brought about a major increase in the funds invested in universities across the country. During this first half decade, the HEC touted that it had overseen a purported increase of 5,000 percent in the budget allocated to the higher education sector. This was hailed unequivocally as a great success.
When the funds-starved higher education sector began to receive much needed inflow of cash, things certainly appeared to look better. Universities repaired their long dilapidated infrastructure. They sent their faculty to pursue PhDs abroad. They invested in scientific equipment and labs. They were able to increase enrolment to make tertiary education accessible to more people.
Read: HEC — stormy times up ahead
But with these improvements and accomplishments came many burdens. There was more money than there were ideas. Our academic institutions became flush with cash, relatively speaking, but it was far more cash than they had the capacity to spend intelligently.
Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission has had a roller-coaster history but part of the problems of higher education have to do with the government throwing money at problems rather than strategising and making smart investments. As much-needed reforms began to be undertaken, however, a former Planning Commission member warns that an effort is underway to revert back to old and wasteful ways of doing things
In hindsight, it is now visible that the pumping of money in the higher education sector was not such an unqualified success after all.
FLUSH WITH MONEY
Throwing money at a problem is hardly ever the solution, particularly for complex societal puzzles. In fact it is, more often than not, part of the problem itself.
Read: Higher education budget cuts
Money can be a solution in relatively simpler scenarios where solutions scale linearly, such as retiring public debt, or where the underlying intervention is well-established and its scale is straightforward, such as building more schools leads to enrolling more out-of-school children into schools. But even here, rather than blindly throwing money at the problem as a quick fix, one must carefully watch out for the perils of saturation, of the impact on quality of outcomes, and of the ability (or lack thereof) of absorbing money.
For more complex problems, such as how to make Pakistan’s higher education system more productive, impactful and globally competitive, or how to reform our public science and technology infrastructure so that it starts delivering results, fund allocations should be carefully planned. Yet, blindly throwing money to solve a problem has often been the first resort and primary modus operandi of some policymakers.
In the initial years of its existence, when large amounts of money was pumped into the HEC, perhaps the most important of unintended consequences was the over-commercialisation of higher education in Pakistan. Public and private universities alike became profitable ‘ventures’ where billions of contracts and jobs had to be awarded.
As universities became a big real estate business, a significant portion of the university heads’ time began to be consumed in managing this sprawling estate — more degrees, more departments and more campuses around the country meant more real estate development and management. Oftentimes, this led to perverse effects. The offices of many professors, deans and vice chancellors at Pakistani universities expanded to become much bigger than the offices of their counterparts at European or American universities.
Many vice chancellors became more preoccupied in planning how to get the next billion-rupee public project or increase enrolment and, sometimes, improve their ‘rankings’ and worried less about whether their university had the capacity to produce quality, job-ready graduates. They spent more time thinking about how many faculty members they can send for PhDs abroad and less time thinking about the calibre of these faculty members and the quality of the institutes where they are sent.
Then, as the financial ‘incentives’ began to affect the decisions taken by the faculty, the higher education system entered a whole new race of ‘quantity vs quality’ in the production of doctoral graduates and the publishing of papers. There have even been allegations about faculty putting their colleagues’ names on their papers so as to increase their publication numbers. Universities do not distinguish between a paper published in a third-rate journal from one published in a highly selective and prestigious one. Our universities thus became paper mills producing a lot of, if not mostly, junk published in below-standard journals, many of which were later discovered to be fake.
Even today, our higher education system only counts the number of papers published as a way of quantifying its success and does not bother to track citations or the true impact of the research. If you were to ask whether a Pakistani author features as a lead author for one of the top 1,000 most cited papers in the world, you would hardly find any. An attempt to identify any piece of research originating from a Pakistani university that left a substantial impact on global society, is a seriously frustrating task.
While there are always some good exceptions, a significant majority of the higher education system refelcts this mindset of prefering quantity over quality.
It has taken well over a decade for the higher education system to realise that money alone cannot solve problems — certainly not the kind of complex problems plaguing our higher education sector and even more complex societal problems such as climate change, basic illiteracy, water scarcity, etc.
SHRINKING OF FUNDS
The contraction of the HEC’s budget from 2008-2012 came as a blessing in disguise — although for the wrong (political) reasons. As money evaporated, only those who did research and published for the love of creating and disseminating knowledge continued to do so. University heads were also forced to check their wasteful ways and began to think frugally and make smarter choices.
The echelons of power in the government called for a second phase of reforms for the HEC that focused on building upon its achievements and critically evaluating what had gone wrong. However, this required a somewhat dispassionate view towards the first phase of HEC reforms (2002-2007) to really put everything under the lens of the evidence driving HEC policy.
An exercise to develop a Higher Education Vision 2025 to clearly define meaningful and impactful success metrics and create an oversight mechanism to keep the HEC (and universities) transparent was undertaken but it failed to take root. ‘Give us the money but don’t ask any questions’ was the attitude of the HEC’s old guard. For most of the projects, the HEC prided itself for its efficiency of spending money. Nobody seemed to care if this money was put to good use. For instance, an assessment of the HEC’s PhD programme resulted in one finding: All the money had been spent and the number of PhD scholarships awarded exceeded the target by a couple. There was no mention of the quality of PhDs produced, their absorption within the country, and their impact on national research. Project after project, the only accomplishment seemed to be that the money allocated to the HEC was being fully spent.
After ingesting five years of overdose and the subsequent contraction, the HEC first showed signs of withdrawal and then gradual recovery.
However, many felt that the pendulum had swung too much far in the other direction.
As the financial ‘incentives’ began to affect the decisions taken by the faculty, the higher education system entered a whole new race of ‘quantity vs quality’ in the production of doctoral graduates and the publishing of papers.
THE PLANNING COMMISSION