Dr. Javaid Laghari, the new Chairman of the Higher Education Commission, said today that providing access to higher education for the 24.5 million youth who are not enrolled in universities will be the top priority for the HEC. Dr. Laghari made these comments about an hour ago during an interview on Breakfast at Dawn, hosted by Naveen Naqvi. According to Dr. Laghari, only 0.5 million youth currently have access to higher education, whereas the number of Pakistanis of university-going age is around 25 million. He felt hopeful that the democratic government will fund the development of new universities to help educate a large number of potential students.
Dr. Javaid Laghari appearing on Breakfast at Dawn today
Dr. Laghari also stated that human resource development will continue to remain a high priority for the HEC and the 2500 PhD scholars on foreign scholarships and 3500 scholars working towards their PhD in Pakistan need not worry about their scholarships being discontinued.
In responding to STEP’s question (communicated to the host via Twitter), Dr. Laghari stated that good policies of the past chairman will be continued, and the effort will be on improving whatever has been achieved in the past. In response to another question from STEP, Dr. Laghari said that rumors of the merging of HEC and the Ministry of Education are not true. Both have a role to play and they should work together for improving education in the country.
Overall, we at STEP are optimistic about the prospects of his appointment for higher education in the country, based on his responses. Oftentimes, there is a tendency on the part of a successor to undo all that has been achieved by previous administrators. Dr. Laghari was generous in giving credit to Dr. Ata ur Rehman but also pointed out some not-so-successful initiatives like the projects to build many universities with foreign collaborations. He implied that his role at HEC will be to build upon and improve what has been achieved in the past.
Am currently doing my BE from a reputed university of Pakistan, the major observation which was made regarding HEC was that my those class fellows who were getting scholarships and other stipends were stopped when the Musahrraf regime was over, and the reason behind this were told that there is no fund for HEC. I want to ask whats the fault to those student whose stipends were stopped in the middle??
Similarly many foreign PhD scholarships were stopped in middle leaving behind the student in the middle of no where!!
So my point is that if HEC can’t manage the present 0.5 million how would be they able to manage 25 million????
The funding cut was probably not due to any fault of HEC, rather the funding dried up from the Govt. But the cuts were restored soon.
Have a look at
http://www.nextstepforward.net/education-pakistan/budget-cuts-for-higher-education-a-sad-state-of-affairs/
and then
http://www.nextstepforward.net/education-pakistan/hec-resumes-foreign-scholarship-program/
I think the HEC worked very hard to get the fundings restored.
From all the reporting, it appears that HEC has weathered the storm and the calls for its merger with the MoE are dying down.
The News is reporting that the loan that HEC was able to secure from the World Bank at favorable terms played a significant role in avoiding the merger ( http://tiny.cc/Mr20V ).
[...] appropriate time, as the new Chairman of HEC, Dr Javaid Laghari takes over (see our posts here, and here). It provides an objective analysis to the new chairman, as he will take on the review of the [...]