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Twenty-four years ago, on 11 September, 2002, Gen Pervez Musharraf signed the Higher Education Commission Ordinance that formally launched Pakistan’s ground-breaking higher education reforms.
This legislation dissolved the University Grants Commission and, in its place, created the Higher Education Commission (HEC) with vast regulatory, financial and administrative autonomy, and an express mandate to restructure the national higher education system and set Pakistan on course to become a knowledge economy.
Over the next five years, the budget allocation for higher education went up by 5,000%. Billions were poured into setting up new universities. A landmark agreement was negotiated with the US to launch what was then considered the world’s largest Fulbright scholarship programme, worth $150 million. Some 5,000 PhD level scholarships were announced for foreign universities, the largest such programme undertaken by a developing country, as well as 3,000 indigenous scholarships. A tenure track system with very competitive salaries was launched to attract and retain the finest academics.
To term these plans ‘ambitious’ would be an understatement. Other countries sat up and took notice. Professor C.N.R. Rao, former chairman of India’s Scientific Advisory Council, told former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2006, “Science is a lucrative profession in Pakistan. It has tripled the salaries of its scientists in the last few years.” This was reported in the Hindustan Times and this particular story carried the by-line: “Pakistan may soon join China in giving India serious competition in science.”
Bangladesh is a big fan of Pakistan’s higher education reforms to this day. Large-scale academic delegations from Bangladesh have visited Pakistan frequently over the last two years, touring our universities, building institutional ties and doing homework for their own reforms. In 2025, Bangladesh’s Ministry of Education released the draft Higher Education Commission Ordinance, explicitly modelled on our framework.
It was an auspicious start, but it was not to last.
Within a decade, the HEC’s autonomy was challenged and higher education funding was dramatically slashed. In an earlier piece, we tracked the collapse of Pakistan’s tenure track system and the mass exodus of Pakistan’s best and brightest academics. Now, as our higher education experiment enters its 25th year — its silver jubilee — it is time to ask the big questions: where do we stand today? What have we accomplished? What mistakes have we made? And, most importantly, how do we move ahead?
Here is a look at the good, the bad and the ugly in the wide-ranging landscape of our higher education system today.
Let a thousand universities bloom
The most obvious indicator of success is the explosive growth of our universities. As per HEC data, in 2001-2002, we had a total of 58 higher education institutions in the country. This count almost doubled to 116 in 2005-2006 and crossed the 200 mark in 2017-2018. As per the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26, we now have 278 universities, an increase of almost 400%, an unprecedented achievement.
Leading Pakistani institutions now routinely feature in international university rankings. Exact positions tend to fluctuate year by year — and we seem unable to break into the global top-350 universities category — but it is most definitely a win.
Student enrolments have similarly skyrocketed, from around 276,000 in 2001-2002 to more than two million in 2023-2024, an increase of more than 600%. Moreover, in 2002, student enrolments were split with 63% males to 37% females. By 2025, this gender gap had almost hit parity, with 52% males versus 48% females.
Another very remarkable milestone is that in our first 54 years of Independence (up to 2002, when our higher education reforms were launched), Pakistan had produced almost 3,000 PhDs. Now we produce more than 3,000 PhDs in a single year.
This also reflects in our academic publication count, which has simply exploded. Our global academic publication count ranking has climbed from 51 to 26 in 25 years. As per the SCImago database, Pakistan’s indexed publications increased from approximately 1,600 in 2002 to over 45,000 in 2025. This March, the HEC formally honoured over a thousand Pakistani researchers featured in a list (curated by Stanford University) of the world’s top 2% scientists.
These are landmark achievements. Very few countries can claim such incredible progress in so short a period of time. After surveying these highly impressive statistics, one would not be remiss in thinking that our higher education experiment is faring very well indeed.
From boom to bailout
Unfortunately, one has only to scratch the surface to unearth grim realities beneath.
Our massive university expansion is now collapsing under its own weight. This issue burst into the spotlight last year with news that almost all public universities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) were experiencing severe financial distress. A leading academic staff association has demanded a Rs25 billion package to bail out the entire sector.
This is not just a KP issue. Deficits are running high in many prestigious universities, salaries are being doled out in instalments, pension payments are being delayed and staff are striking and heading for the courts.
This August, the federal government approved a Rs2 billion bailout for Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. Mounting costs had completely exhausted the university’s pension fund. It was a struggle to fund even basic operations, such as replenishing laboratory chemical supplies.
In Sindh, Karachi University reported a Rs1.3 billion deficit, followed by a paralysing strike that made nationwide headlines. The Federal Urdu University of Arts, Sciences and Technology in Karachi has piled up a backlog of Rs1.2 billion in salaries, pensions and other liabilities, and requires another Rs1.7 billion infusion for daily operations. Sindh University’s 2026-27 budget includes Rs3.75 billion in grants from the provincial government and Rs1.716 billion from the federal government and the HEC.
This March, the Balochistan government stepped in with Rs857 million payment to 11 universities in the province. Soon after, in a rare and very welcome move, Balochistan Governor Jaffar Khan Mandokhail announced an increase in the public universities’ budget from Rs2.5 billion to Rs8 billion.
The University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir has reported a shortfall of more than Rs1.3 billion, with staff threatening campus shutdowns. Punjab University has reported a Rs3.68 billion deficit, which they intend to address through internal borrowing.
The walking dead — university edition
These numbers are just some highlights, but this crisis has been a decade in the making and the entire sector is on life support today. So, what’s the worst case scenario?
In 2024, reports emerged that a leading international lending agency — its identity was not revealed — floated a study indicating that around 80% of our public universities would default within three to four years. This reads like a mass-extinction event. There are multiple reasons for this.
First and foremost, the federal government has capped the recurring budget for universities at Rs65 billion, a limit in place since 2017-18. But back in 2017, we had almost a hundred universities less than we do today. And, of course, in 2017, the US dollar averaged Rs105. Those were the ‘good old’ days.
This year, the HEC had internally calculated a requirement of Rs138 billion and had requested the government for at least Rs100 billion, but that requirement was not met. The provinces have also been grossly remiss in their contributions. This trend is not a higher education problem, it applies to the entire education sector as a whole. Last year’s Pakistan Economic Survey revealed that Pakistan’s education spending had dropped precipitously to just 0.8% of the country’s GDP, far below Unesco’s recommended benchmark of four to 6%.
It gets much worse. To get a sense of this Rs65 billion number, I looked up the balance sheet of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, where I did my own postgraduate studies. In 2025, UNSW reported operational expenses amounting to AUD3.28 billion, around Rs630 billion. In short, this one university in Australia — an undeniably good international university, but certainly no global superstar like the Ivy League universities in the US or the Russell Group universities in the UK — has an annual budget almost tenfold what our government allocates to all of Pakistan’s public sector universities put together.
The great ‘supermarketification’
Setting up new universities in Pakistan has also taken on an unfortunate ‘franchise’ mentality — as first documented by the historian Dr Yaqoob Bangash — akin to setting up branches of a departmental store chain. Little thought is given to genuine need, excellence and standards or long term sustainability. For instance, last year in KP, with most universities on the brink of collapse, the provincial government moved to set up two new universities.
Launching universities has also become a potent grift, a way for politicians and administrators to score political benefits, securing lucrative development contracts, setting up employment avenues and putting the government on the hook. In this model, explicated by former member of the Planning Commission Waqas bin Najib in his Dawn Op-Ed ‘Building the Knowledge Economy’, universities may be conceptualised as “patronage vehicles.” And the HEC acts as “a real estate fund manager.”
Our universities are also decades behind international best practices, featuring cumbersome processes and paperwork reminiscent of our colonial era and abysmal governance.
A Supreme Court order of 2024 noted that most universities are in contravention of their own laws and are being run on the “personal whims” of those in charge. Almost all public sector universities have too many non-academic staff, significantly in excess of the HEC’s prescribed 1:1.5 ratio of academics versus non-academics. A recent HEC survey found that a staggering 40% of key faculty and administrative positions in universities were lying vacant.
With numbers like these, one cannot help but wonder: how are things still even working?
The emperor’s new degrees
But, are things really working?
A common refrain we academics hear is that universities are not producing skilled and capable graduates. There is little hard data for this claim. Our systems are very good at recording and advertising glittering statistics, such as university counts, student enrolment and publications, but relatively quiet when it comes to graduate outcomes, employment numbers, career progression etc.
But, every now and then, we get hints that lay bare the sheer magnitude of this problem.
For instance, at a session organised by the American Business Forum (ABF) and the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums) this September, Federal Minister for IT and Telecommunication Shaza Fatima Khawaja revealed the results of a national baseline test of 33,000 final year computer science students from 190 universities. Across 10 employability competencies, only 0.4% students scored above 80%. A mere four% scored above 68%. Overall, 61% students languished below the 50% mark.
Likewise, the Central Superior Services (CSS) written examination results were announced in August. Of over 16,000 candidates appearing in all papers, only 476 qualified for the next stage, a share of 2.74%. This brutal rate is not an anomaly; the CSS exams are certainly very competitive. But examiners noted a definite decline in standards. In a written note to the National Assembly, Senator Ahad Khan Cheema attributed this high failure rate to poor academic background, weak analytical and comprehension skills and subpar written expression.
The most alarming story I personally came across is from 2023, when the KP Public Service Commission (PSC) revealed that candidates with postgraduate degrees struggled to solve basic math problems without calculators. In language and literature tests, students’ grammar, syntax and pronunciation were found to be abysmal.
“It has been noted that the quality and extent of knowledge of the candidates, having postgraduate qualification, is superficial,” stated their report, noting that candidates were “shaky and lack confidence” during interviews. They then asked the obvious question: “Are the teaching institutions properly equipped with teaching faculty and do they provide a scholarly environment to their students?”
These examples are deeply unsettling. And even as there is growing recognition of this collapse in educational outcomes, we have yet to see serious meaningful solutions. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has called for audits and urgent reforms. The HEC has mandated professional internships and industry-relevant certifications for undergrad degree programmes. The Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, Ahsan Iqbal, has directed the chairman of the HEC to undertake an immediate and comprehensive review of all university degree programmes and curricula across Pakistan to align programmes with industrial trends.
The emperor’s new research
University research output tells an equally disturbing story.
Behind the glitzy numbers, the overwhelming trend in Pakistani academia is now to publish papers in journals of middling to low quality — typically predatory or mega-journals — which charge extravagant article processing fees to rush publication without rigorous peer review. The end result is a flood of papers of mediocre and questionable quality, but which nevertheless tick all the boxes needed to get promoted in our system.
This practice is not research, it is more akin to a transaction. An entire industry of shady journals now operates, earning billions every year in pumping up the research credentials of academics in developing countries like ours. This practice is widely acknowledged in our circles and is usually met with a shrug. But it has now reached critical proportions that we can now only ignore at our peril.
For instance, a study from 2024 analysed around 500 social sciences and humanities articles published by 50 Pakistani professors over a five-year period. They found that almost 70% of the sampled papers were published in journals that were unrecognised by the HEC’s online journal recognition system and classed as predatory. Another study, also from 2024, focusing on the physical education and sports sciences domains, found that almost 90% of sampled papers appeared in questionable or predatory journals.
These are catastrophic numbers. However, these are just snapshots of the overall sector. We urgently need more comprehensive studies to tell us how deep this rot really runs.
The rankings reality check
The standards of our research output also reflects in international rankings, which specifically prioritise research quality over quantity.
The Times Higher Education University Rankings are particularly research-driven and this year they included 56 Pakistani universities. However, the results were abysmal. No Pakistani university features in the global top 500. Quaid-i-Azam University, our highest-ranked institution, shows up in the 551-600 range. The vast majority of Pakistani universities are ranked 801-1,000.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) — popularly referred to as the Shanghai rankings — which places a very high premium on quality research, included only four Pakistani universities in its assessment this year: COMSATS University, the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Quaid-i-Azam University and the University of the Punjab. All of them were in the 801-900 global range.
Likewise, the SCImago Institutions Rankings, a research and innovation-focused system, ranks COMSATS University Islamabad as Pakistan’s best at the 1,715 position globally. NUST is second at 2,126. The majority of Pakistani universities show up after the 5,000 mark.
The integrity deficit
Unethical practices also feature prominently in our system.
A 2025 study undertaken by the renowned John Ioannidis from Stanford University, a pioneer in the study of research practices, ranks Pakistan as one of the world’s leaders in paper retraction rates (at 28.1 retracted papers per 10,000). This rate lags only slightly behind Saudi Arabia (30.6) and is almost double that of India (15.2).
A retraction indicates a research paper that can no longer be trusted and is therefore withdrawn from the record. This could be because of an honest mistake or oversight on the part of the authors or publisher. However, it is, more often than not, due to falsified data, fraud or plagiarism.
In their 2025 study, Ioannidis and colleagues matched retraction records against their database of the world’s top-cited scientists in their sub-domains. Of the handful of Pakistani authors on the list, they found that almost 30% also had retracted papers on their record.
In an article in the renowned journal Scientometrics, Ioannidis again highlights Pakistan prominently in his list of countries where “extreme publishing” is sharply on the rise. He identifies “spurious practices”, such as consortium agreements, self-citation and gift authorships, which researchers use to inflate their publication metrics.
What do these terms mean exactly? A recent study on Pakistan’s publication culture titled ‘Research Culture in Pakistan’s Higher Education Institutions’ features a despairing quote by an anonymous academic: “People tend to self-cite or ask their peers and students to cite their work abundantly to appear in the so-called two% list published by Stanford University. This number game has produced research cartels and people seem to scratch each other’s back.”
We certainly have local researchers who are no doubt genuinely prolific, sincere to their calling and their valuable achievements should be celebrated. But our universities lack the institutional checks and, more importantly, the will to stop this unscrupulous numbers game.
A metric that matters
When unethical practices become institutionalised and systemic, they invariably get flagged at the international level. For corruption, we have the Transparency International ranking, for democracy, there is the Freedom House score and the Economist’s Democracy Index. For research, we have the recently developed Research Integrity Risk Index.
This tool evaluates universities using a metric focused on retracted papers and anomalous citation patterns. Of 19 leading Pakistani universities featured in this system this year, almost all were flagged as red flag (extreme or significant deviation from global norms), high risk, or on the watch list. Only one university (Aga Khan University) was classed as relatively normal. No Pakistani university exhibited low risk, ie “strong adherence to publishing integrity norms.”
The results of this index have generated heated debate in countries such as India, Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia and Morocco. Unfortunately, it’s crickets here in Pakistan.
Reform begins with reckoning
So, here we stand today. The bold reforms of 2002 that were to transform Pakistan into a knowledge economy have instead mutated into a gargantuan Frankenstein’s monster, which limps into its 25th year, too big to fail and too difficult to reform.
We want a knowledge economy but we do not seem to care about knowledge at all.
I have written on national-level issues before — our perennial smog problem, broken elections etc — and I often get emails from readers telling me they enjoyed the piece but wish I had offered ‘solutions’. Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets here. Our problems are immense, fiendishly complex and infuriatingly bound up with our colonial baggage.
The only real suggestion I can offer would read as painfully naïve: that stakeholders confront these inconvenient truths, make education a priority — the priority — set aside their egos to engage with critics and sceptics in good faith, and rebuild this system brick-by-brick. The hard truth is that many people saw this collapse coming from miles away and they sounded the alarm, but were largely ignored.
As an academic who has worked with government ministries, civil servants and politicians, I also realise this is a very difficult ask. It is much more tempting to set up yet another high-powered committee, call in the international consultants or introduce some new foreign and glamorous system. In short, business as usual.
Nothing new under the sun
It might surprise many to learn that the original architects of our higher education enterprise foresaw this collapse. They even spelt it out explicitly for us in the original Task Force report of 2002, the founding document of our higher education experiment, which resulted in the Higher Education Commission Ordinance and the creation of the HEC.
Early in the report, they listed prominent challenges faced by Pakistan’s higher education sector, amid logistical and material issues, infrastructure, governance, politicisation and the like. They noted the curious problem of “[s]trong scepticism about the realisation of reform.” At the very end of their report, they quoted a report penned in 1959 by the Commission on National Education, one of the earliest attempts to reform Pakistan’s education system. And the authors of that particular report did not mince their words, which is why their statements are worth quoting at length:
“Education… can meet its responsibilities only if a revision of attitudes on the part of the professional educator is accompanied by a change in the view point of the government and the public… In education, the prevailing attitude of the public and those responsible in government was that it warranted low priority… Although our leaders were now the architects of policy rather than the implementers of the policy of others, education was neither in fact nor theory given the importance that would enable it to meet the needs of a people who controlled their own destiny…
“We cannot escape the conclusion that our fundamental need is for a revolution in attitudes, through which the cynicism, lethargy, opportunism, suspicion, dishonesty and indifference that have characterised the outlook of so many of our people and officials in the past will give way to a spirit of individual initiative, personal integrity, pride in accomplishment, trust in one’s fellow men and a ‘private sense of public duty.’ We have no illusion that this reorientation of values can be brought about quickly or completely, or that it can be realised only through fiat, yet come it must if we are to achieve any substantial improvement in our education system or any other sphere of national endeavour.”
Nearly 65 years later, these words could not ring more true. One is sorely tempted to frame them and set them up on the desk of every higher education professional in the country, not just teachers and researchers, but especially the administrators, the vice-chancellors and the bureaucrats.
It would be apt to close here with another prophecy all too self-evident in Pakistan today. This is a quotation by the novelist and historian H. G. Wells, which opens the World Bank’s landmark ‘Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise’ report from 2000: “Human history becomes more and more of a race between education and catastrophe.”
This is the second in an investigative series that does a deep dive into the myriad issues faced by Pakistan’s higher education sector
The author is an academic based in Islamabad. He is grateful to colleagues for extensive discussions and feedback on this article. He can be reached at [email protected]
Published in Dawn, EOS, November 1st, 2026