Pakistan's Rising College Enrollment and Graduation Rates

There are over 3 million students enrolled in grades 13 through 16 in Pakistan's 1,086 degree colleges and 161 universities, according to Pakistan Higher Education Commission report for 2013-14.  The 3 million enrollment is 15% of the 20 million Pakistanis in the eligible age group of 18-24 years.  In addition, there are over 255,000 Pakistanis enrolled in vocational training schools, according to Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (TEVTA).

Graduation Day at NED Engineering University For 1300 Graduates in 2013

Pakistani universities have been producing over half a million graduates, including over 10,000 IT graduates, every year since 2010, according to HEC data. The number of university graduates in Pakistan increased from 380,773 in 2005-6 to 493,993 in 2008-09. This figure is growing with rising enrollment and contributing to Pakistan's growing human capital.

Rising University Enrollment in Pakistan Starting in 2001-2002. Source: ICEF Monitor

Source: UNESCO's Global Education Digest 2009

Higher education in Pakistan has come a long way since its independence in 1947 when there was only one university, the University of Punjab. By 1997, the number of universities had risen to 35, of which 3 were federally administered and 22 were under the provincial governments, with a combined enrollment of 71,819 students. A big spending boost by President Pervez Musharraf helped establish 51 new universities and awarding institutions during 2002-2008. This helped triple university enrollment from 135,000 in 2003 to about 400,000 in 2008, according to Dr. Ata ur Rehman who led the charge for expanding higher education during Musharraf years. There are 161 universities with 1.5 million students enrolled in Pakistan as of 2014.

Former Chairman of HEC summed up the country's higher education progress well in a piece he wrote for The News in 2012: "Pakistan has achieved critical mass and reached a point of take-off. For this phenomenal growth to continue, it is important for the government and other stakeholders to support and further strengthen the HEC as a national institution and protect its autonomy. If this momentum continues for another 10 years, Pakistan is certain to become a global player through a flourishing knowledge economy and a highly literate population".

Related Links:

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10 Pakistan Universities Among Top 300 in Asia

Pakistan's Growing Human Capital

History of Literacy in Pakistan

Education Attainment in South Asia

Dr. Ata ur Rehman Defends HEC Reforms

Biotech and Genomics in Pakistan

Business Education in Pakistan

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2014 QS Rankings: 10 Pakistani Universities Among Asia's Top 300

QS World University Rankings 2014 announcement lists 10 Pakistani universities among Asia's top 300.

South Asian institutions featuring on this list include 17 from India, 10 from Pakistan and 1 each from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The list is topped by Singapore with its National University at #1 and includes Singapore's Nanyang Technical University at #7. It is dominated by 58 universities from China (including 7 in Hong Kong and 1 in Macao), 50 from Japan, 47 from South Korea and 28 from Taiwan. Other nations represented with universities among top 300 in Asia are: Malaysia (17), Thailand (10), Indonesia (9), Philippines (5), Vietnam (3) and Brunei (1).

Pakistani Universities Among Top 300 Asian Universities (Source: QS World Rankings)

Pakistani universities on the list are: Pakistan Inst of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS) at  106,  Aga Khan University (AKU) at 116,  Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU)at 123 National University of Sciences and Trechnology (NUST) at  129, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) at 180-190,  COMSATS Institute of Technology at 201-250, Karachi University (KU) at 201-250, Punjab University (PU) at 201-250,  University of Agriculture Faisalabad  (UAF) at 251-300 and University of Engineering Technology (UET) Lahore at 251-300.

Rise in international rankings of Pakistani universities began during Musharraf years when the annual budget for higher education increased from only Rs 500 million in 2000 to Rs 28 billion in 2008, to lay the foundations of the development of a strong knowledge economy, according to former education minister Dr. Ata ur Rehman. Student enrollment in universities increased from 270,000 to 900,000 and the number of universities and degree awarding institutions increased from 57 in 2000 to 137 by 2008. Government R&D spending jumped seven-fold from 0.1% of GDP in 1999 to 0.7% of GDP in 2007.

Related Links:

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Musharraf Earned Legitimacy By Good Governance

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Political Patronage Trumps Public Policy in Pakistan

Dr. Ata-ur-Rehman Defends Pakistan's Higher Education Reforms

Pakistan's Economic Performance 2008-2010

Role of Politics in Pakistan Economy

India and Pakistan Compared in 2011

Human Development in Musharraf Years

Will Saudi Society Change Peacefully?

Saudi society has long been dominated by the overzealous religious police, known as mutawa or mutaween, who strictly enforce the Saudi version of the Islamic Sharia Laws. The most visible manifestations of such enforcement include the almost total gender segregation, conservative dress code in public, and interruption of business for prayers five times a day.

There are some recent signs that the Saudi government is moving toward broader social reform by beginning to create new mutawa-free spaces within the Kingdom where the rules are different. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is one such space. Not only is the university co-educational, it has no dress code, nor does it allow the mutaween to enforce their rules. By offering greater freedom, the university is attempting to attract the best and the brightest academics, researchers and students from around the globe to create a world-class institution.

This is how the University describes itself: "The principles of academic freedom ensure that faculty members and researchers may conduct research and publish the results without undue hindrance or control. As an international university with many partners, KAUST recognizes the importance of academic freedom and the challenges presented by taking account of the various intellectual property regimes in the home countries of KAUST partner institutions."

IBM is one of the many international partners of KAUST. According to Businessweek, KAUST agreed to buy an IBM supercomputer, which is an essential tool in the research projects that IBM and the Saudis are targeting for their first collaboration. Among other things, the two teams will collaborate on a study of the nearby Red Sea, which they believe will help improve oil and mineral exploration. "[The supercomputer] is a magnet for smart people, and it makes it possible for us to solve big problems," says Majid F. Al-Ghaslan, KAUST's interim chief information officer.

Not content with KAUST to spur change, the Saudi ruler King Abdullah is now pushing the creation of four new special cities, according to the New York Times.

The first of these four cities is King Abdullah Economic City-KAEC (pronounced "cake"), a 65-square-mile development along the Red Sea. With a projected population of two million, the city is a Middle Eastern version of the “special economic zones” that have flourished in places like China.

Here is how New York Times describes the implications of the planned Saudi effort:

If the plan works, at best it would transform Saudi Arabia into a technologically advanced society controlled by a slightly more tolerant religious autocracy. Or it could provoke militant violence and government crackdowns. “What they are trying to do is very difficult,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University who has written extensively on Saudi Arabia. “Someone telling you to go pray — that in-your-face religion — that’s not going to be permitted in these cities. It’s a more ecumenical Islam. But it’s a slippery slope. Once you start, you’ve basically opened up the door to a certain degree of diversity and tolerance.”

KAEC is expected to be followed by three other cities: Knowledge Economic City near Medina, the second holiest city for Muslims; Prince Abdulaziz bin Mousaed Economic City, 450 miles north of Riyadh, which will focus on agribusiness; and Jazan Economic City, proposed to create industrial jobs for Saudis living near the border with Yemen, where al Qaeda is believed to be very active.

The fact that Saudi leaders recognize the need to change was articulated recently by Sir William Charters Patey, the British ambassador in Riyadh until May 2010, in a interview with Arab News as follows: “They accept that you can’t just go on the same old way. Some of the assumptions that underpin Saudi Arabia...may not be enough to see them into the future.”

The Saudi rulers understand that oil could no longer be taken for granted. It currently accounts for 60 percent of GDP and 90 percent of revenue. Moreover, the country’s population is forecast to double over the next three decades and the Kingdom will need to generate income from other sources by then.

Patey said that the strategy, “a sensible and pragmatic one,” was to use the Kingdom’s current energy advantage to diversify into industries that are energy intensive. Saudi Arabia, he said, had also embarked on an ambitious strategy of developing a knowledge-based economy.

Change will eventually come to Saudi Arabia, but many questions remain about the process. Can the Saudi rulers escape the inevitable backlash from the adherents of the extreme Wahabi ideology that they have exported to other Muslim nations such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen? Will there be a process of political liberalization to match social and economic reforms? What will be the pace of this change? Will such change come peacefully? Can the current Saudi government manage this transition without unleashing widespread instability in Saudi Arabia, the Middle East and the wider Islamic world? How will the Saudi Kingdom's western allies and its neighbors react to such instability?

It's hard for any one, including the Saudis, to answer these and other similar questions now. The only thing that can be said with any certainty at this time is that the change is inevitable, and the face of the Middle East and Islamic world will change dramatically by the end of the 21st century.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Quality of Higher Education in India and Pakistan

Is Pakistan Emulating Saudi Arabia?

Jihadis Growing in Tenth Year of Afghan War

Pakistan Must Defeat Agents of Intolerance

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy: "Islam and Science Have Parted Ways"

Clash of Ideas in Islam

Turkey, Pakistan and Secularism

Jinnah's Vision for Pakistan

Gaza Compared With Warsaw's Nazi Concentration Camp

"Gaza is Israel's Warsaw -- a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians. We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide," says sociology professor William I. Robinson of University of California at Santa Barbara.

As is the norm at universities in America, any criticism of Israel is immediately followed by an orchestrated campaign of attacks and intimidation against the critic. In this case, there has been swift condemnation of professor Robinson, who is Jewish, as being an anti-Semite. Beyond verbal attacks, he is being actively harassed by the well-known actors usually involved in curbing any freedom of expression that involves criticism of the Jewish state.

In addition to its powerful presence in Washington, the Israel lobby has moved into the university campuses in America to ‘take back the campuses’, according to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt of Harvard university, who have written as follows:

(Following criticism of Israel on campuses after Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power in 2002) The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.

Here is the text of the email sent by Professor Robinson:

Subject: [socforum] parallel images of Nazis and Israelis
From: “William I. Robinson” …
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:00:05
…

If Martin Luther King were alive on this day of January 19, 2009, there is no doubt that he would be condemning the Israeli aggression against Gaza along with U.S. military and political support for Israeli war crimes, or that he would be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinians. I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the most frightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of the carnage but that which shows Israeli children writing “with love” on a bomb that will tear apart Palestinian children.

Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw - a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians, subjecting them to the slow death of malnutrition, disease and despair, nearly two years before their subjection to the quick death of Israeli bombs. We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide (Websters: “the systematic killing of, or a program of action intended to destroy, a whole national or ethnic group”), a process whose objective is not so much to physically eliminate each and every Palestinian than to eliminate the Palestinians as a people in any meaningful sense of the notion of people-hood.

The Israeli army is the fifth most potent military machine in the world and one that is backed by a propaganda machine that rivals and may well surpass that of the U.S., a machine that dares to make the ludicrous and obnoxious claim that opposition to the policies and practices of the Israeli state is anti-Semitism. It should be no surprise that a state founded on the negation of a people was one of the principal backers of the apartheid South African state not to mention of the Latin American military dictatorships until those regimes collapsed under mass protest, and today arms, trains, and advises military and paramilitary forces in Colombia, one of the world’s worst human rights violators.

Here is the latest story about Professor Robinson as reported by Los Angles Times recently:

Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor's decision to send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza offensive.

The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has triggered a campus investigation and drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from two national Jewish groups, even as many students and faculty members have voiced support for him.

The uproar began in January when Robinson sent his message -- titled "parallel images of Nazis and Israelis" -- to the 80 students in his sociology of globalization class.

The e-mail contained more than two dozen photographs of Jewish victims of the Nazis, including those of dead children, juxtaposed with nearly identical images from the Gaza Strip. It also included an article critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and a note from Robinson.

"Gaza is Israel's Warsaw -- a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians," the professor wrote. "We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide."

Two Jewish students dropped the class, saying they felt intimidated by the professor's message. They contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which advised them to file formal complaints with the university.

In their letters, senior Rebecca Joseph and junior Tova Hausman accused Robinson of violating the campus' faculty code of conduct by disseminating personal, political material unrelated to his course.

"I was shocked," said Joseph, 22. "He overstepped his boundaries as a professor. He has his own freedom of speech, but he doesn't have the freedom to send his students his own opinion that is so strong."

Robinson, 50, who is Jewish, called the accusations and the campus investigation an attack on academic freedom. He said his former students, the Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League had all confused his criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism.

"That's like saying if I condemn the U.S. government for the invasion of Iraq, I'm anti-American," he said. "It's the most absurd, baseless argument."

Robinson said he regularly sends his students voluntary reading material about current events for the global affairs course, and that no one raised questions when he subsequently discussed his e-mail.

"The whole nature of academic freedom is to introduce students to controversial material, to provoke students to think and make students uncomfortable," said Robinson, a UC Santa Barbara professor for nine years.

As the dispute over his e-mail plays out, UC Santa Barbara has become the most recent U.S. university to confront campus unrest over issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In recent years, Jewish and Muslim groups have quarreled repeatedly at UC Irvine about the Holocaust and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Professors and students at Columbia University have also argued over issues of intimidation and academic freedom amid debates on the Mideast.

In Robinson's case, reaction has been strong -- on both sides.

Shortly after hearing from the two students in January, the Wiesenthal Center produced a YouTube video titled "Jewish Students Under Siege from Professor at UC Santa Barbara." The clip shows one of Robinson's former students, her face obscured to protect her identity, reading from his e-mail.

The head of the ADL's Santa Barbara region sent Robinson a letter in February calling on him to repudiate his statements about Israel. Last month, the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, in a meeting with faculty members at the campus, urged the university to conduct an investigation into Robinson. He was told that an inquiry was already underway.

"You can criticize Israel; you can criticize the war in Gaza," Foxman said. "But to compare what the Israelis are doing in defense of their citizens to what the Nazis did to the Jews is clearly anti-Semitism."

Robinson's supporters say the professor is being maligned for exercising his right to challenge his students to think critically about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Students on campus have formed a group, the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB, which is chronicling the saga on its website.

Letters of support also have arrived from academics across the country, including one from California Scholars for Academic Freedom, which says it represents 100 professors at 20 college campuses. The group argues that the allegations have been raised against Robinson to "silence criticism of Israeli policies and practices."

Some UC Santa Barbara faculty members also are speaking up for Robinson. History professor Harold Marcuse, who attended the March meeting with the ADL's Foxman, said the pictures e-mailed by Robinson were "well within the bounds of appropriateness on campus. It's something I could have used in a course."

Marcuse, who is Jewish and teaches about the Holocaust in his world history and German history classes, said he would not have injected his own views into such a message to students, but added: "I don't think Bill Robinson's e-mail is anti-Semitic in any way. I think criticism of Israel is OK."

One UC Santa Barbara official has already looked into the allegations against Robinson, and a faculty committee is being formed to decide whether to forward the case to UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry Yang. A university spokesman declined to comment on the case.

Robinson has hired an attorney, and the student committee supporting him has scheduled a May 14 campus forum on the matter. Joseph and Hausman, the students who filed the original complaints, said they plan to attend. So do Hausman's parents from Los Angeles and Rabbi Aron Hier, director of campus outreach for the Wiesenthal Center.

"I just want to bring awareness," said Hausman, 20. "I want people to know that educators shouldn't be sending out something that is so disturbing."

Related Links:

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Israel's Gaza Attack is Criminal, Not Defensive

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