STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

Bilal Zafar is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California (USC) and a graduate research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute. His research work is focused on computer architecture and interconnection networks, and real passion is teaching. He has served two terms as a Teaching Assistant Fellow at USC’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, and was the receipient of Best Teaching Assistant award in 2006.

Dr. Shaukhat Hammed Khan is the Executive Director of Society for the Promotion of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan (SOPREST), the parent body of GIK Institute. A nuclear physicist by training, he recently served as the Rector of GIKI and member of the Planning Commission. In Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Khan we talk about GIKI — its vision and its future, his work on lasers and much more. Part 1 of our conversation is here.

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Very few scientists are able to successfully navigate the road between a research lab, academic administration, and the government. Shaukhat Hameed Khan is certainly one scientist who has. An Oxford-trained nuclear physicist, Dr. Khan started the first group working on lasers at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission in 1969. During the proceeding four decades, he contributed to the nation’s nuclear program, served as the Rector of Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, and as a member of the Planning Commission. Dr. Khan now serves as the Executive Director of Society for the Promotion of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan (SOPREST), the parent body of GIK Institute. In this two-part interview, we talk about higher education, HEC, GIKI and much more.

Let’s start by talking about the recent funding crisis at the HEC and the universities. Do the universities have a point that current funding is simply inadequate? Is there a way out?

The Universities are quite vulnerable as regards their development budgets, which are frozen except for the projects nearing completion. I believe considerable funds have been released for their operational expenditures and the critical moment is over.

I must point out that while the HEC has done excellent work by focusing on developing the physical and intellectual infrastructure and hence access to higher education, this growth cannot continue at such a high rate indefinitely. The Universities have been conditioned by HEC to expect funding increases every year, with few serious reviews in place. In fact, (until recently) HEC was expecting 20-26 % increase in funds annually for the foreseeable future, which was simply not sustainable.

The recent funding crisis was foreseen earlier, and the HEC was cautioned as far back in 2007 by the Planning Commission – where I looked after Higher Education – to pause and consolidate, to slow down expansion, and concentrate on quality matters, which is perhaps more important than mere numbers. After all the only deliverable from a University is its graduates and their competence and ability in meeting the demands of the very competitive 21st century. This does not mean, as some have suggested recently, that the HEC and Universities should not have received large funding at all. However, this crisis has thrown up the opportunity for a major review of the HEC itself, and address the issues of its organizational efficiency, and decision framework. Of particular importance are activities related to funding for research, accreditation, and rankings which needs to be reviewed for potential conflict of interest. This is extremely urgent under the new devolution regime.

Please remember that Pakistan is not unique in facing this problem. Higher education and its funding is in crisis everywhere. This is why Western Universities solicit students from countries such as Pakistan so that they can continue to subsidize their own students one way or the other. Coming now to the present, even without a financial crisis as at present, this tapering off of funds would have happened, but it should have been gentler and more gradual. With the economy being badly hit by several factors such as the global crisis in financial sector, inflation in fuel and food prices, war in Afghanistan next door, and now the floods; all have heightened the fragility of governance and macroeconomic instability.

The current stress on the Universities is expected to continue.

What is the way out?

First, reduce costs, and mobilize other resources simultaneously, with a moratorium on new development projects for at least 3-4 years. The word should be: Consolidate. There is just not enough faculty to allow further expansion, and the result of this shortage is that we have a ‘teach – hop – teach’ syndrome exploited by roaming ‘visiting faculty’. While a few thousand PhDs will no doubt be joining Pakistani universities in the near future, I do not buy into the argument that a freshly returned PhD , no matter how talented, must also be a good teacher.

Ultimately it comes down finally to increasing internal efficiencies. Increase the student: teacher ratios to 25 instead of 18 to one, and reduce the very high ratio of non-teaching staff to total staff in Universities. This hasn’t changed much over the years and need to come down to 1:1 from the current 3:1 Perhaps more mergers may be the answer, as there are too many small, non-critical, and hence inefficient institutions operating in Pakistan. Hardly any University has enrollment on its own campus(es) of 15,000 to 25,000 students. I ignore affiliated colleges, which offer two year degrees.

Given the funding shortfall we’re likely to face even in the future, isn’t increasing the tuition fee a prudent option? Shouldn’t public universities be responsible for generating at least some significant portion of their operating expenditure?

Public universities certainly need to generate more funds themselves, and should also be more prudent in expenditures, because the desired funds will just not be available. Let me give you an idea of the expected shortfall. According to the HEC’s  Medium Term  Development Framework (MTDF 2005-2015) the projected expenditures are  Rs 1150 billion over this period.  The resultant shortfall would be nearly Rs 600 billion unless  additional resources are harnessed, as pointed out by the World Bank in late 2006. Such expenditures are neither feasible nor justified given the national  tax : GDP ratio  of only about 10%. The matter is made worse by the increasing burden of pensions and major increase in emoluments of all employees.

What are the possible solutions?

First, the HEC must slow down the pace of development and expansion, and should stop any new programmes for 4-5 years.

Second, there is no choice but to increase tuition fees, which is admittedly likely to result in higher unit costs / student apart from slowing the growth in enrolment and increasing the inequities already existing in the country’s education structure. On the other hand, it is argued that Higher Education provides an economic advantage to those who get it, and no fees (or low fees) gives an unfair economic facility to those who can afford to pay.

This is not easy to implement, as it is linked with the sensitive question about how much cost recovery is reasonable. All public universities should be encouraged to progressively generate at least 50% of their operational expenses within five years, coupled with rigorous means testing for financial assistance in order to preserve some equity. The concept of interest-free student loans from an expanded Student Fund needs to be visited, with the loans being paid back after obtaining jobs.

Thirdly, we need to recall our traditional concept of waqf through land being attached to universities for their upkeep. All our major mosques and madrassa have such endowments. Oxford and Cambridge are the biggest landlords in the UK while land-grant universities in the USA have also been quite successful. Some Pakistani universities have plenty of spare land even after decades of existence, and can use some of it to generate some revenues. Vertical physical growth will also be more efficient in space utilization. This also means raising and managing endowment funds from alumni and businessmen.

Fourthly, HEC needs to improve its own internal efficiencies as well as of universities (student teacher ratios, faculty: non-faculty numbers, better trained and educated administrative personnel). While the operational costs of HEC are of the order of 3% of its operational funding of universities, it is too high when the sheer disparity in its personnel numbers versus all the universities is taken into account.

Fifth, the HEC needs to revisit all the incentives it offered to university faculty for doing research and supervising PhD students. This may no longer be valid now with much enhanced faculty salaries, and will reduce the operating costs considerably.

Sixth, the student numbers being sent abroad for MS or PhD need to be reduced in the proportion of the returning PhD scholars from abroad, as more and more PhD work should be done progressively within the country.

All these measures have to be applied simultaneously.

What do you make of the role that the private sector is playing in higher education in Pakistan? Current and likely future funding shortfalls for public sector universities will likely increase the role that private universities are playing? How can that be managed better?

The private sector is already very active in higher education, with some 35 % of enrollment, and 60 private universities as against 75 public institutions. It can make even greater contribution by reducing the burden on the public exchequer, specially in the present crisis, where its role can be more efficient in providing access to higher education. Even though private Institutions are generally smaller, and more expensive, their graduates such as from GIKI and LUMS  are well regarded by academia, business and industry.

It would be necessary to provide the private sector a more level playing field by making them eligible for state R& D funds, which should be neutral and depend only on the quality of proposal. At the same time, they will need they need to submit to greater regulation, scrutiny,  and transparency in quality and financial matters, in regard to full-time faculty and the exemption from income tax.

In our interview with Dr. Asad Abidi, he talked about the importance of vocational training and how most of the industrial economies were built on vocational training. Why hasn’t that happened in Pakistan? And, would establishing vocational training institutions not have been a better investment of public funds than sending students for PhDs, funding research at local universities,  and other programs that HEC started ?

I agree entirely with Dr Asad Abidi.  We cannot increase our economic envelope without raising our collective competence, which alone will ensure our breaking out of the low skills, low productivity, low expectations trap. Just 1% of our 12-17 age group are enrolled in some skill-development programme as compared with, say, Turkey which enrolls nearly 21% of this age cohort.  Why is this so? It is not glamorous enough. We have more doctors than nurses and more engineers than technicians. However, it is not an either-or situation.

We have to improve the quality of students entering University; even more important we need to make secondary education economically relevant, which requires rapid increase in funding for schools and colleges.

We now need to move beyond merely higher education and focus on schools and colleges, specially the neglected transition link between school education and economically relevant skills. After all the knowledge worker in the 21st Century is as much the switchboard operator, or the admissions clerk in a college or the person behind the sales counter or the fisherman and farm worker, as is a PhD.

I feel that the vocationalisation of secondary education (class 8-10) with one or more vocational tracks offered to complement traditional schooling will help reduce school dropouts and improve productivity. It will also make our young people more employable, and keep them away from social distress and mischief. When I left GIKI as Rector, I went back briefly to the Planning Commission and managed to produce a policy paper on expanding quality and relevance of vocational/technical education. This has been accepted by the CDWP and also recently accepted by USAID one of three major reforms needed in Pakistan’s education sector.

Do remember that university and vocational training are not an either-or choice. Both are essential, and with universities now approaching a certain threshold, it is possible to shift the focus to the neglected technical training sector.

I estimate that it will cost a fifth per student per year for a technical diploma /certificate as compared with a university undergraduate degree, with earlier economic returns.

In Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Shaukhat Hameed Khan we talk about GIKI and Dr. Khan’s experience working as the Rector of GIKI.

The next talk in the STEP Lecture Series will be given by Dr. Derek Chiou on Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 5:00pm PST. The talk has been organized in collaboration with various universities in Pakistan and will be streamed live. A brief Q&A session will follow the talk. Undergraduate and graduate students with non-engineering backgrounds are also encouraged to attend.

Title: Fast and Accurate Simulation of Computer Systems

Where:
Air University
AKU-IED
BZU Multan
FAST-NU Islamabad
IMS Peshawar
LUMS
NUST SEECS
UET Taxilla
University of Sargodha
SZABIST

When: March 25, 2010, at 5:10-6:25pm Pakistan Standard Time (7:10-8:25am CDT)

Online video of the talk

Abstract:

Simulators of computers are essential starting from the architectural phase, through implementation and verification, and even during software development and tuning.  However, building computer simulators that are both fast and accurate has traditionally been a challenging problem that has recently been further aggravated by the proliferation of multicore processors. In this talk, I will describe the FPGA-Accelerated Simulation Technologies (FAST) methodology for building fast, parallelized, full-system, cycle-accurate-capable simulators of multicore target systems.  Our current implementation of a FAST simulator runs on a multicore+FPGA platform and simulates a multicore x86 system running unmodified Linux.  Simulation speeds are roughly 10MIPS range in cycle-accurate mode and significantly faster at lower accuracy.  The simulator is currently being augmented with power estimation and reliability modeling capabilities at the same simulation speeds.

Bio:

Derek Chiou is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  His research areas are high performance computer simulation, computer architecture, parallel computing, Internet router architecture and network processors.  Before UT, Dr. Chiou was a system architect for five years at Avici Systems, a manufacturer of terabit core routers.  Dr. Chiou received his Ph.D., S.M. and S.B. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. His research is supported by a DOE Career award, an NSF CAREER award, NSF and SRC awards as well as donations from Intel, IBM, Xilinx, Freescale, Altera, and VMWare.

Acknowledgments: STEP is very grateful to Dr. Shahab Baqai at LUMS for his continued support and help in organizing the lecture series. Special thanks to Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) for facilitating the video broadcast of this talk.

There has been no dearth of commentary on the Kerry Lugar Bill. It has been hotly debated inside our parliament, on every T.V. channel in Pakistan and in every nook and corner of the country.

Much of the debate has focused on the political dimensions of the bill and rightly so. Our relationship with the sole superpower of our times indeed exists within a lot of context and that context needs to be factored into any conversation regarding a Pakistan facing legislation in the United States.

The final fate of the bill and how the finances are utilized will get decided in the corridors of power and then eternally debated for our lifetimes but it might be beneficial as an intellectual exercise to look at what the bill entails in absence of the conditions, rules and the political assertions contained in the bill. So let’s commence this intellectual journey in a parallel universe where the Kerry Lugar bill is politically context-less and is merely a document on educational reform.

I personally feel that Kerry Lugar aid or no Kerry Lugar aid, but the crumbs scattered all over the bill that point to a comprehensive approach to education and the thought that has gone into authoring this approach to education has elements that should definitely get factored into our national education and socioeconomic development policy.

It felt very strange to me reading the bill closely that a document written by an outside nation can cover the breadth of our problems so well and ends up focusing on just the right set of socioeconomic fundamentals that must be addressed to cure those problems that our own leaders have failed to address time and again. Or perhaps the ailments that afflict our nation or for that matter every third world nation are way too obvious. The impressive laundry list of the referred fundamentals is way too long to cite here but even a cursory browsing of the bill makes the breadth and comprehensiveness evident.

We can deep dive as part of this intellectual journey in any of the problem areas highlighted in the bill and find tidbits scattered across the bill relevant to that problem but no other subject gained as many words of text as did education.

Looking at education, there are a number of key pieces of this comprehensive approach to education that gets highlighted in the bill. I would look at it as three parallel streams that feed off each and also contribute to each other. This is not a statement of how the authors view the bill but a statement of how I would like to tie all of the pieces in the bill together to form a comprehensive whole given my personal understanding of our dilemmas. The first stream would be a focus on both tiers of education i.e. primary/secondary and higher education. The second is an understanding that no approach to education exists outside the realities enforced by economics. The third is an appreciation for the fact that in a nascent democracy such as ours civic education becomes as important or even more important than literacy type education.

Within the primary/secondary tier of the first stream, the focus is rightly on enhancing access to education by expanding the outreach of public education making it as broadly available as possible and helping out NGOs already making a difference in this space. At the same time the bill calls for improving the other variable in the education by "support (ing) the strengthening of core curricula and quality of schools". There is additional stress on "initiatives to increase women’s literacy, with a special emphasis on helping girls stay in school" and on looping in violence prone youth. On the other hand, for higher education the focus is on imparting professional skills that are needed in our environment, "support for institutions of higher learning with international accreditation"," programs relating to ensure a breadth and consistency of Pakistani graduates, including through public-private partnerships, "expanded exchange activities" and "expand(ed) sister institution programs between United States and Pakistani schools and universities".

For both these tiers, the economic imperatives have been kept in mind. There are references to relevant vocational education and imparting technical training to the expanded pool of literate youth emerging from the primary/secondary education so that they can be part of the infrastructure developments being suggested elsewhere in the bill. For the other end of the spectrum, public-private partnerships have been suggested as a way to feed the economy as well as absorb the highly skilled workforce coming out of higher education institutions. The bill also talks about "access to microfinance for small business establishment and income generation" to provide economic opportunities for a more educated nation. Together these three facets provide at least the beginnings of the tie-in that needs to be there between education and economic prospects in an impoverished nation like ours.

I was pretty happy to see that there was repeated talk all over the bill about civic education. That is one aspect of our education that we frequently ignore at our own peril. Introducing concepts of civic responsibility, voter responsibility, respect for human rights, realization of the impact of violence with or without uniform, religious freedom and tolerance, and women rights should be as much a part of education in Pakistan as anything else. Violence has been a part of our national psyche in one way or another and if we can just address that, we will doing ourselves great good in the long term. An even more refreshing aspect of civic education that was suggested was "enhancing the capacity of committees to oversee government activities", as well as "enhancing the ability of members of parliament to respond to constituents" and adequately represent their electorate.

Things are always easier said than done but coupled together, these three streams form a holistic approach to targeting the complexities of our educational problems. I am sure our political, military and media luminaries have read the bill extensively to criticize its political connotations. My hope is that it also became clearer to them, while reading the bill, that our list of problems is long and complex. Under these circumstances, a broad comprehensive approach grounded in our socioeconomic reality rather than the random array of schemes that pop up and disappear with each government is a necessary condition in tackling any one of those problems including education.