The ‘MBA craze’

Young people are not free to choose what to study; those choices are dictated by circumstances and societal pressure

The educated in Pakistan are not a very diverse lot. Most of the students nowadays study business-related majors and even those who don’t often end up in corporate careers. Very few pursue liberal arts and other programmes, partly because there aren’t many ready-made career paths that they would want to follow after graduation.

I grew up at a time when the MBA had captured the imagination of a certain cohort of parents and youth. Prior to that, the fields of medicine and engineering were the absolute favourites. The societal pressure to choose only from a select few of education and career paths is bound to have some impact on what our society is shaped into. Although things are changing now — new educational and career opportunities are emerging — the majority of the university-going population in Pakistan is still unable to make a largely independent choice.

The fact that only a tiny minority of Pakistanis get the opportunity to pursue higher education makes their choice of major even more important. Yet, to this day, most higher-education choices and by extension career choices, are not made by the young minds that will inherit the socioeconomic challenges of the future, but by circumstances and societal pressures.

The economy plays a vital role in curtailing our choices. One has to, for example, sacrifice enormously more in Pakistan than in a first-world economy to pursue a career that generally does not pay well. Say, you want to be a sociologist and not an engineer as your parents wish. If this were Norway, you probably would have chosen the career that offered life-long personal and job satisfaction, work that you found meaningful. In Pakistan, however, the differential is too great, the pay scales too wide apart, to allow for such luxury.

A significant share of the blame also goes to our culture and the ensuing societal pressures. Obedience and conformity are values almost intrinsic to Pakistani society. “How dare you make decisions on your own, without involving me, your parent?” they seem to ask. This is, after all, a society where unmarried men and women in their twenties, and sometimes beyond, live with their parents and are often referred to as ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ in colloquial speech.

New ideas, for better or worse, emerge from within the educated circles of society. Unless our leading universities start churning out graduates in literature, philosophy, sociology, statistics, law, ethics, political science and psychology, our educated elite will continue to have a very myopic world view.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 29^th, 2014.