Ailing higher education in Pakistan: role of HEC

The culture of the HEC is marred by bureaucratic centralisation with concentration of power in the Chairman's office

In Pakistan there have been numerous policies for the education sector, but for the first time during 2001-2002, the Task Force for Improvement of Higher Education focussed exclusively on higher education. One of the Task Force’s recommendations resulted in the establishment of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in September 2002.

The HEC has a wide mandate, but its core functions are to channel funds to public universities; and formulate policies, establish standards and regulate higher education institutions in the country. The HEC has since spent considerable treasure and taken numerous steps to, ostensibly, improve higher education. However, since the establishment of the HEC, the quality of most graduates, especially of public sector universities and colleges, has not improved, and in fact seems to have deteriorated; reasons for which are briefly described below.

The overall culture of the HEC is marred by bureaucratic centralisation with concentration of power in the office of the Chairman. The Chairman is not only the executive head of the HEC, but also chairs the HEC Commission (akin to a Governing Board). So, the Commission, that supposedly holds the Chairman accountable, is chaired by the very same individual, and the de facto Chairman is accountable only to the Prime Minister. Also, the mode of appointment of the Chairman is highly questionable, with politics and nepotism being the primary determinants. Further, the various structural components (called Divisions) of the HEC seem to have been put together quite haphazardly, with unclear responsibilities and overlapping functions, which unsurprisingly fosters inefficiency and poor decision-making.

Operationally the HEC itself does not adhere to even the bare minimums of institutional functioning like transparency, accountability, efficiency and meritocracy. Rather, it is more like the Chairman’s fiefdom, and there is no room for questioning or critical examination of HEC decisions and activities. Externally, universities are ‘directed’ to do this or that through notifications and directives, which is primarily enforced by tightening or loosening of the purse strings. Internally, the Chairman patronises yes-individuals, who are coddled through promotions and other perks, and those raising questions are sidelined or simply shown the door.

Despite being a core function of the HEC, policymaking has been a low priority. Instead, the HEC addresses policy matters through poorly drafted and at times contradictory notifications or directives. For example, until 2020, the HEC did not have a coherent PhD policy that could ensure minimum standards and quality. Matters were addressed through official missives written by individuals with no sense of what a PhD degree entails academically. Similarly, until 2020 the HEC did not have a policy for undergraduate education, and matters were similarly addressed. Even after the issuance of the PhD policy and the Undergraduate Education Policy, both in 2020, the strongest resistance to their implementation in letter and spirit came from within the HEC.

The HEC measures its achievements by the amount of (public) money garnered and spent, without much regard to the achievement of academic goals and purposes. So, many costly projects are undertaken that have negligible, if any, academic benefits. A culture of rent-seeking is rampant and the blue-eyed enjoy windfalls, which has resulted in numerous distortions in the sector, mostly academically meaningless, and many detrimental.

Finally, the HEC focusses on quantity (or number) of degrees, with inattention to their quality. For example, a flagship goal of the HEC has been increasing the number of PhDs. Several measures are in place that loads the dice to increasing PhD production, and consequently there has been a veritable PhD gold-rush. This quantitative tunnel-vision of the HEC has resulted in the nosediving of the quality and academic value of most local doctorates. An army of PhD-holders has been produced, with poor knowledge, skills and competencies, and who are mostly unemployable. All manner of capacity building and university placement systems have been tried to accommodate the unemployed PhDs, but nothing can repair the damage wrought by awarding sham doctorates in the first place. In a word, the HEC failed in its role of ensuring and regulating the quality of doctoral work, and has instead, inadvertently, or otherwise, led in the opposite direction.

Linked to the above is the fact that per HEC policy, faculty career progression is tied entirely to the number of research publications. This has spawned spurious research, rampant plagiarism, unethical inclusion of names in each other’s publications, and a fake publications industry. Further, the faculty ignores teaching and other academic services as they have no bearing on their careers. Importantly, this has resulted in an academic culture in which cheating trumps academic honesty.

The key performance indicator of the HEC is improvement in the quality of graduates. However, despite high publicity and heavy expenditures, overall, the quality of our graduates remains poor: telling evidence of which is the severe scarcity of competent individuals who can ably run affairs of society and state. As currently constituted and run, on balance, the HEC is doing more harm than good to higher education. Therefore, the need is to rethink and reconstitute the HEC, so that it can contribute to enhancing the quality of higher education, which is its raison d’être.