Undergraduate focus

AN estimated 39 per cent of young people go to university in the US, 36pc in the UK, 27pc in India and about 8-9pc in Pakistan. This despite all the recent expansions in the university sector in the country.

Yes, youth unemployment amongst educated youth is high in the country. But that is a reflection of the current poor growth, poor quality of education at the college/ university level, skill mismatch and lack of entrepreneurial opportunities for young people. Other countries are giving many more youth university education; they are not having the same problems and, instead, are provided with interesting and rewarding career paths. It would be hard to imagine a flourishing economy, for a country of 250-million-plus people, where only 8-9pc of young people go to university.

But as a country, we have never really focused on undergraduate education in Pakistan. In the early 2000s, when we had a lot more fiscal space and there was a push to expand higher education under the regulatory eye of the HEC, the high and mighty decided to focus on opening graduate and doctoral programmes and making a big push for increasing the number of publications per faculty member. Teaching, undergraduate education, the humanities and social sciences were ignored. We are still reaping the results of the poor policies of the early 2000s.

Young people have an undergraduate education aged 18-23 or so. These are tremendously important years for the formation and maturing of individuals. These are the years when young people start living on their own, start managing their own lives, have their first loves and heartbreaks, delve deeper into questions of identity and who they want to be as well as into existential questions, look hard at what they want to spend their life doing and start gaining a more comprehensive understanding of whatever they decide to study. What an important period. If we do not help and support the young in this period, and for most young people this can only be done through educational institutions, many will move forward without the education, knowledge, experiences and understanding that are needed for them to lead rewarding lives and in the process help their families, communities and the country.

Universities define entry criteria for admission, often narrowly, and create notions of ‘merit’. Then applicants are ranked on the basis of merit and students at the top of the list are offered admission. Top universities practically the world over, boast low ‘acceptance’ rates, saying they only take the top 5-10pc of the applicant pool. It is strange that the marketing and admission offices of these universities work hard to encourage larger numbers to apply for admission only to boast how many they have been able to reject!

As a country, we have never really focused on undergraduate education.

This seems like a dated model for gauging quality. Most young people are capable of benefiting from undergraduate education, most have the baseline qualifications (12 years of schooling) to be able to do that, most will benefit a lot in terms of their career trajectories and prospects, as well as in terms of personal growth, other than the contributions they will be making to national progress, because of undergraduate education.

So why should the rejection of applicants be a mark of quality and why should it be something to be celebrated?

The real mark of quality should be the difference that a university has been able to make in the life, education, knowledge, understanding and skills of any student who spends four years at the institution. This is the notion of ‘value-added’ or the ‘delta’ the university has been able to provide.

With automation, digitisation and the advent of AI, the nature of jobs is changing and will continue to change for quite some time. Most jobs that do not require human agency will get automated. Jobs that will remain for humans will require, as a baseline, excellent interpersonal skills, communication skills, skills for argumentation, articulation, and skills for quick thinking and quick reaction other than advanced job-specific skills. For countries to survive and thrive in the economy of tomorrow, a larger number of young people will need to be educated and at a higher level. So, 8-9pc of young people getting, by and large, a poor quality of undergraduate education is not going to help. Some experts in the US argue that 50pc of their youth cohort needs to get an undergraduate education. We have to compete in the same economy. How are we going to do that?

Top-tier universities in Pakistan, public and private, emulate the old ‘low acceptance’ model of quality; the rest, with a varied quality of teaching and learning, do not focus on the task of teaching undergraduates well. University priorities have focused on establishing and expanding Master’s and doctoral programmes, while the faculty’s priority, as a result of promotion criteria, has been to publish as many papers as possible, using whatever means available. HEC sets the priorities, of course, but these priorities are wrong. They have still not been corrected.

The government wants to export more labour to the rest of the world. They believe this is the dividend our demography can give us. But we cannot export and others will not be willing to import if the labour is not educated and trained in the skills that are needed by the rest of the world. We need to reorient our universities to make them realise this. The real power lies in a solid or high-quality undergraduate education.

We need to see a lot more young people getting an undergraduate education of solid quality in Pakistan. We need undergraduate education to be more aligned with the markets of tomorrow, and our young people should come out with the foundational education, knowledge, understanding and skills needed to navigate what will be a far more complex labour market in the times to come. Will the higher-ups, regulators and universities wake up and smell the coffee?

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums.

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2025