Collapse of higher education

The quiet shutdown of postgraduate programmes at Karachi University should concern anyone still holding out hope for public education in Pakistan. More than 10 departments, including Criminology, Health and Physical Education, and Islamic Banking, will not be accepting MPhil or PhD students in 2025. The reason is embarrassing: the university no longer has the faculty to teach them.

Earlier, its School of Law had already suspended admissions. One department after the other. Higher education is receding rapidly. There is no shortage of evidence explaining how we got here. Universities have been underfunded for years. Hiring processes are politicised. Promising scholars, many of them trained at public expense, find no jobs or no institutional support upon return. Some leave. Others give up. A growing number never come back at all. In this environment, what incentive remains for academic excellence? Certainly not in the public sector, where research is poorly funded and administrative dysfunction is the norm. Karachi University's case is simply more visible - many smaller universities have been facing similar pressures, just less publicly.

Our policymakers have long treated higher education as a numbers game: more campuses, more enrolment, more degrees. But when institutions are forced to stop producing scholars altogether, the collapse can no longer be hidden behind annual convocation speeches. This is not a loss we can afford to normalise. The federal and provincial governments must treat faculty recruitment and retention as a priority through structural reform. This requires competitive salaries, transparent hiring processes and clearly defined tenure and promotion pathways that reward merit. Returning PhDs should be absorbed into the system through properly funded positions, not left in administrative limbo. Without scholars, there can be no universities. Without universities, there can be no innovation, no critical thinking, no meaningful progress.