1.5m students to miss college this year

Govt urged to increase number of seats at colleges

LAHORE:

A whopping number of students -- around 1.5 million -- who recently passed their matriculation exams could not get into public sector colleges in the province this year.

There are no marks for guessing why such a state of affairs exists: there are just not enough intermediate colleges to accommodate the left out students.

Around two million students in the province passed this year’s matriculation exams while there are only 500,000 seats at the 750 public sector colleges in the Punjab while the rest -- 1.5 million -- are now on the mercy of colleges in the private sector.

What this means is that thousands of poor students in the far-flung districts and villages will see a year of theirs wasted as far as education is concerned as they cannot afford education at a private college while seats at the public sector colleges are packed to capacity.

These students hailed from 36 districts of the Punjab.

College teachers and parents are demanding of the government to increase the number of seats at colleges and to start evening shifts at all the public-sector colleges.

This year has been an uncharacteristic one considering the fact that all the students were declared to have passed their exams in pursuance of a federal government notification. Naturally the colleges did not have the capacity to put up with this surge of students.

"This year there was a pressure on colleges regarding intermediate admissions as no student was failed due to policy.

This year we also received a record number of applications for admissions, but we could only adjust the students according to our capacity,” said Anwer Khan, spokesman for the Lahore College for Women University.

Time almost seems to have run out as far as the left out students are concerned since the admission process to the intermediate classes in the Punjab has come to a close this week.

“There are a total of 750 colleges, including commerce colleges, and most of the colleges are also running evening shifts too, but we have a total capacity for 500,000 students at our colleges. These 500,000 students are also a burden on colleges as we are facing issues of staff and also of infrastructure.

This is a disappointing situation as according to an estimate around one million students have left education in the Punjab due to lack of opportunities of education and some other domestic reasons,” said Professor Tariq Kaleem, president of the Punjab Professors and Lecturers Association (PPLA).

Published in The Express Tribune, November 4^th, 2021.