STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

“Get good education and move to a bad neighborhood” was a constant advice I received from my advisor over the last six years that I spent at the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) as a Fulbright scholar for my MS and PhD programs in Computer Science. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent article by Sohaib Khan has touched a very important subject. Let me start by saying that I do not disagree with the core idea of that piece which, if I am allowed to summarize in a sentence, would be that research in Pakistan needs to be relevant to the local problems, with young researchers mentored towards practical, solutions-oriented research. Read the rest of this entry »

On Funding Projects from the Industry

STEP: Till now, mostly you were funding projects in the academia. Would you be looking at funding projects that are directly initiated by the industry?

QS: We are supposed to fund projects submitted by the industry. Our proposal can be initiated by even an individual. But, being an entity that funds public money, the longevity of the institution to which we are giving money is very important to us. An individual can take the money (from us), work for a little while, and then disappear. What do we do then? Universities don’t disappear. They can provide longevity and credibility to the project. And, it is not (just) longevity for the length of that project but even after that. Read the rest of this entry »

Nature’s recent article on higher education in Pakistan has re-ignited the debate on higher education reform, evoking strong responses from both supporters and critics of the HEC. Recently, we interviewed the lead author Dr. Athar Osama, to learn more about his wider conclusions, and his response to some of the criticisms of the methodology used in the Nature article.

To seed this discussion, we present commentary from Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman. Dr. Hoodbhoy presents his opposing point of view, arguing that the measures presented in the article were inadequate, and further that the conclusions drawn from the metrics were flawed. Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman, founding (and former) chairman of the HEC, who led the higher education reform effort during his tenure, responds by pointing to data that, in his view, shows the depth and breadth of the reform’s success.

We invite our readers to contribute their thoughts on what metrics are appropriate for measuring the success of higher education within the context of Pakistan.

NOTE: Both commentators have significantly shaped the landscape of Pakistani education over the last few decades. We request our discussants to avoid personalizing the discussion and to maintain a civil and constructive tone.

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Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy has reproduced his email but not my subsequent response to it.

There are four aspects of the comments of Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy that need to be considered:

1. Firstly, Dr. Hoodbhoy himself admits that there has been a huge increase in international publications at QAU after HEC came into existence when he mentions the number of international publications in the two time periods. Strangely, he picks a six year period, 1998-2003, and then compares it with the subsequent 4.5 years (?) , 2004 to mid 2008, (the correspondence occurred in August 2008, so he could not possibly have had access to the figures for the entire year) I can only assume that he has mentioned 2003 by mistake in the second “5 year” period as there is no reason to include the publications of the year 2003 in both time periods, which he has done. It is clearly unfair to take two time periods of different durations and compare them.

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This communication is concerned with “Pakistan’s Reform Experiment” (Nature, V461, page 38, 3 September 2009), and the response to my critique by its lead author.

Unfortunately, I find the response as unsatisfying as the original article. Since Nature is unwilling to accord me a chance for a satisfactory reply on its pages, I shall clarify the basis of my criticism in some detail here.

In the said article, strong conclusions have been derived from weak data. The authors have not dared to ask the basic questions whose answers are essential for ascertaining whether there has been actual progress in Pakistan’s higher education system and, if so, by how much. Instead, in giving a thumbs-up, numbers have been quoted that have doubtful significance. Take, for instance, the claim that:

“In mathematics, for example, an average paper by a Pakistani author is cited around 20% more than the worldwide average for the discipline”.

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Pakistan has been rated a ‘Rising Star’ in research multiple times over the last couple of years by ScienceWatch.com, a Thompson Reuters website which tracks trends and performance in research by analyzing its database of scientific papers and citations. The ‘Rising Star’ rankings are published every two months to acknowledge new entrants, by identifying the scientists, institutions, countries, and journals which have shown the largest percentage increase in total citations.  In the May issue of the ratings, Pakistan was named a ‘rising star’ in two areas, ‘Materials Science’ and ‘Plant & Animal Science’. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Since the establishment of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002, the higher education sector in Pakistan has undergone a transformation both in its size and its nature. Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC, has been at the helm of many of these changes. STEP’s student editor Mariyam Khalid recently sat down with Dr. Naqvi to learn more about the HEC and its mandate. In the second of this two part interview, the scope of the HEC’s mandate and its policy-making procedures are discussed. The interview concludes with Dr. Naqvi’s vision for the future of the HEC.

STEP: Do you think that the HEC has taken too much on its plate? It is directly involved in curriculum setting, hiring and firing professors, setting up distance education classrooms, and even assessing universities. Should the HEC delegate some of these tasks?

SN: We definitely should delegate some of these tasks and we are now actively involved in trying to distance ourselves from institutions of programs. Earlier, we got involved with so many of these things because nobody was doing them nor did we have any mechanism for them, for example, foreign faculty hiring. Actually, Faculty hiring should be done by universities as per best practices, where the universities themselves identify the qualified personnel, negotiate their salaries, and provide them incentives to join the faculty. Universities are fully capable of doing that but they were not doing it. Which is why we had to get involved in the execution of a lot of programs. The scholarship program is another example that comes to mind. But we are now shifting our focus. For example, we are shifting the scholarship program so that it now needs to be run by the universities as per best practices. So there was a need to build the capacities of the universities to perform best practices and have good governance. There are other small sized agencies that are not doing enough and are not widespread enough. For example, the HEC has not been involved in the domain of colleges at the moment, and we are criticized on various forums that we should be. But it is a capacity issue; the HEC can only do so much. It is an evolving organization as any living organization has to be. We took on the tasks that nobody else had done before. There were things we needed to do ourselves to get things started. We have designed a lot of these things so that they would start moving at an arm’s length over time and ultimately become independent entities away from the HEC. So the answer to your question is that yes, we could delegate but at times we need to build the organization to which we can delegate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Since the establishment of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002, the higher education sector in Pakistan has undergone a transformation both in its size and its nature. Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC, has been at the helm of many of these changes. STEP’s student editor Mariyam Khalid recently sat down with Dr. Naqvi to learn more about the HEC and its mandate. In the first of this two-part interview, the performance of the HEC, the local relevance of research and other key issues regarding research in Pakistan are examined.

STEP: You have worked as a professor, as a dean, as an industrial entrepreneur and now as a policy-maker in the government. Which of these roles did you find the most rewarding?

SN: I find the one that I’m doing now the most rewarding because of its ability to influence so many factors pertaining to education in Pakistan. But I do miss the university environment, especially the interaction with students. I’ve always loved teaching and being in the classroom. In fact, I sometimes catch myself talking to my colleagues as if I’m lecturing them! So that’s definitely something that I do miss. There is a freedom in being a professor that is simply not available in any other job. When I’ve had it with administration, I can always go back to being a professor. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent paper by Prof. Najeeb Shafiq, from Indiana University, titled “Do Education and Income Affect Support for Democracy in Muslim Countries? Evidence from the Pew Global Attitudes Project” studies the influence of education and income on support for democracy in five Muslim countries including Pakistan. The paper draws several conclusions, both surprising and expected. The study is based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project data:

“The data for this study comes from the PGAP 2005, collected in the spring of 2005. PGAP 2005 contains data on approximately 1000 ordinary men and women (of age 18 or above) from Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey. Efforts were made to ensure nationally representative samples, but the sample from Pakistan is disproportionately urban.”

With the rural majority of Pakistanis living in feudal societies, it is unfortunate that “the sample from Pakistan is disproportionately urban.” It would be interesting to know what sort of increase in traction for democratic reform would result from increased education in rural Pakistan; is education really the silver bullet, or is economic reform a better route to social reform. Nonetheless, the study indicates that, in Pakistan, support for democracy is a social benefit of primary and secondary education; and further than the trends in Muslim countries do not differ from the trends in countries around the world. However, when compared to respondents in Turkey, Indonesia, Jordan, and Lebanon,

“…there is low support for democracy in Pakistan (27.4 percent), arguably because General Pervez Musharraf’s regime was perceived as successful at the time of the survey.”

The recent IRI survey confirms this observation.

I also found it intriguing that higher education did not change views in support of democracy, and further that:

“…there is almost no statistical relationship between belonging to the richest groups and having an attitude towards democracy; thus, this study cannot confirm or reject suspicions that the most educated and richest members of society oppose democracy.”

The heterogeneity of the five countries, in language, culture, level of industrialization, and history, raises questions on whether meaningful conclusions can be made broadly about five countries bound only by religion. However, research of this sort is indispensable in creating policy informed by empirical data and analysis, rather than by political expediency.