A one-day training workshop on How to write a winning research proposal was organized by the Office of Research Innovation and Commercialization (ORIC) at Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU), the other day. More than 70 faculty members attended the workshop. Former chairman, Pakistan Council for S ..
Tough challenges
May 12, 2021
Universities in Pakistan have suffered greatly in the last three years because of the misguided policies of the Higher Education Commission and the failure of its leadership to convince the government to provide proper and reasonable funding.
The operational budget of the HEC has remained frozen since 2017, causing huge damage to the higher education sector. It was Rs63.18 bln in 2017-18, Rs65.02 bln in 2018-19, Rs64.10 bln 2019-20 and Rs64.10 bln in 2020-21. The grant per student enrolled has collapsed in dollar terms, which is relevant as research students spend most of the university funds for imported chemicals, solvents and equipment. It was $782 in the year 2013-14, but is now only $413 per student after seven years, although inflation and other factors should have led to its doubling in this seven-year period to about $1600 per student.
Untangling the HEC’s timeline
Opinion
May 9, 2021
All the problems of the higher education sector are being laid at the feet of the HEC management being pushed out before the end of its term, by means of another ill-advised and poorly thought through ordinance that will cut short the HEC chairman’s tenure from four years down to two. At this point, it is worth examining some of the most significant and enduring problems in higher education, their timelines and, if we can, their origins.
The HEC is being accused of training and hiring too few PhDs to work at universities. Selecting, sending and training a single PhD can easily take five to six years. Given the length of this pipeline, the seeds of any problems on this count were sown at least five years earlier.
Higher education ravaged
April 7, 2021
The HEC policies during the last three years led to a mushroom growth of 50 new universities, while simultaneously the programmes to develop highly qualified faculty were curtailed.
Some 8,000 scholarships available for PhD level training, worth about 50 billion rupees, were held back by the HEC. This resulted in a sharp drop in the PhD level faculty-to-student ratio and a corresponding decline in the quality of education, since the quality of undergraduate and postgraduate education is directly dependent on the number and quality of qualified faculty available. Thousands of our young men and women were thus needlessly deprived of being trained at the world’s best universities, and then contribute to the development of this nation.
Dilemma of HEC research grants tribune.com.pk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tribune.com.pk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.