College admissions: NTS financial success irks lawmakers

Parliamentary committee calls for lower testing fees to help students

ISLAMABAD:

Faced with evidence of the increasing financial success of the state-owned National Testing Service, a parliamentary panel on Thursday proposed a 20% cut in the fees charged by the nation’s largest standardised testing service so that more students can afford to take the entrance examinations for public universities across the country.

The proposal came up at the Senate Science and Technology Committee, which was conducting hearings into three identical petitions calling for a reduction in the fees charged by NTS, as well as a check on allegedly corrupt practices by NTS officials, including demanding bribes, etc.

NTS is the state-owned standardised testing company that was introduced under the Musharraf Administration to allow universities across Pakistan to assess the qualifications of high school students applying for admission.



NTS CEO Haroon Rasheed told the committee that, since its founding in 2002, the organisation has administered 5,052 tests to 10.5 million students nationwide. During that period, NTS has built relationships with 360 institutions and has earned over Rs5 billion in revenue. Revenue during fiscal 2015 alone was Rs1.1 billion, up from just Rs191 million in 2013. The surplus for 2015 was Rs270 million. Salary expenses also rose from Rs17 million in 2013 to Rs91 million in the most recent year.

Yet the senators saw the financial success of NTS as a bad thing and railed against it. “NTS has become a business success story. It is a money making machine without proper safeguards in place for governance and quality assurance. It is a company that has more than 25% profit margins, and these margins are earned by charging high fees from test takers, who are generally from poor or middle class backgrounds,” said Committee Chairman Senator Osman Saifullah Khan from the PPP. “There is a need for the Government to review whether the existing business model is the right one for the objectives that the government is trying to achieve.”

Rasheed said that NTS invested Rs236 million from its surplus from fiscal 2015 into term deposits at Allied Bank and another Rs55 million in fixed deposits for a total of Rs321 million in cash and cash equivalents.

In 2014, NTS allocated Rs136 million for scholarships for students but it is not disclosed in the financial statements how many scholarships have been awarded, and of what monetary value.

The committee recommended that the Board of Directors should have at least seven independent directors, who should belong to institutions other than COMSATS.

The committee said that it was for the government to decide who the members of the organization should be, whether NTS should continue to be COMSATS-controlled, or other public sector universities should be involved in the control of NTS, so that it becomes a true “national testing service”.

The committee also directed the Higher Education Commission to implement the Lahore High Court’s order that the “HEC through proper channel will propose an amendment in the Ordinance/Rules in order to provide a proper regulatory framework for establishing, monitoring and supervising a ‘national testing service’.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 11^th,  2015.