Dr Rehman skewed the system of higher education from quality towards quantity

• News By : Web Desk
• 2022-06-12 11:27:23

Lahore: 12 June 2022: I have never been an admirer of Pervaiz Hodbhoy as he is a leftist extremist, and extremism of any side be it right or left clouds your vision to see things with clarity, but I fully agree with his arguments shared in reply to Dr Atta ur Rehman's letter asking for apology.
Dr Rehman unfortunately skewed the system of higher education from quality towards quantity, a lot of institutions which had no capacity had been upgraded to universities under his supervision and the new ones made, specially in the private domain were just money making machines teaching students absolute rubbish in the name of higher education, even at the PhD level situation is deplorable and perhaps Pakistan is the only nation on the planet experiencing the phenomenon of "Junk PhDs" who are not employable by any standard in research and development or any other sector of economy and their numbers are now touching thousands. Yes we have thousand plus PhDs who don't have any job!
Moreover the ratio of unemployment in educated graduates and master level people is higher than people who are less educated or illiterate thanks to the quantitative approach adopted by Dr Sahab. The misery is that this cycle is no where near its ending it is rather in its prime and will continue to touch its zenith in coming years. Almost 15 lac students are entering each year into market who have either college level or graduation/masters level degree and they are competing for ever shrinking job market at public or private level, this thing in itself is a ticking time bomb, but as there has been no policy to manage this the cycle will continue adding millions of educated jobless people in future few years in Pakistan.
It is time to wake up to the reality and do something but when I see faces of people who are our leaders indulged spitefully in petty political fights the hope for this issue to be addressed seems remote and it is only expected from few intelligent people to understand this on individual level and set their own sails and sails of their children accordingly, as I posted earlier it is better to invest money in smaller business fail twice or thrice, learn and build fortune than investing lacs of rupees in these useless degrees.
Malik Hassan Ali

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