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.
Opinion
April 21, 2021
The writer is an independent education researcher and consultant. She has a PhD in Education from Michigan State University.
Public debates on technical issues which ought to be argued with facts quickly tend to become politicized and circle around personalities instead, be it infrastructure development, transportation systems, education. The ongoing debate about the Higher Education Commission’s (HEC) policy decisions in recent years is much the same. A lot of the criticism lobbed at the former chairperson of the HEC centers on two significant initiatives.
First, is the reclassification of legacy two-year bachelor’s programmes as ‘Associate Bachelors’ degrees. Only four-year programmes will now qualify for the title of BA/ BSc bachelor’s degrees. This step was much needed because until recently a variety of two- three- and four-year programs all qualified as BA/ BSc degrees. Figuring out how much training and education their degree holder receiv