Accredited on paper, educated in reality? Pakistan’s quality assurance dilemma

A university proudly displays its accreditation certificate. Its laboratories have been inspected, faculty credentials verified, curricula reviewed, and hundreds of documents examined. The visiting accreditation team leaves satisfied. Yet an uncomfortable question remains: Are its graduates genuinely better prepared to solve real-world problems?

This question deserves serious attention as Pakistan continues strengthening its higher education quality assurance system.

Accreditation is intended to protect students, safeguard professional standards, strengthen institutional accountability, and promote continuous educational improvement. It assures society that academic programmes meet established quality requirements. However, accreditation should never become an achievement measured primarily by certificates, inspection reports, and completed checklists. Pakistan has an extensive accreditation framework involving the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC), Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC), National Computing Education Accreditation Council (NCEAC), National Business Education Accreditation Council (NBEAC), and several other professional and discipline-specific bodies. Their responsibilities extend beyond institutional inspection. Engineering accreditation should help produce competent engineers. Medical accreditation must safeguard clinical education and patient safety. Computing accreditation should encourage graduates capable of developing reliable technologies. Teacher education accreditation should ultimately contribute to better classroom instruction.

But who measures whether these expectations are actually being achieved?

Consider two engineering programmes. One possesses sophisticated laboratories, comprehensive documentation, and impressive infrastructure. Another operates with fewer resources but produces graduates demonstrating stronger problem-solving abilities, innovation, and professional competence.

Which programme delivers better education?

Infrastructure and qualified faculty are indispensable, but they represent conditions for educational quality, not necessarily evidence of its achievement. Pakistan’s engineering accreditation experience provides an instructive example. In June 2017, Pakistan, represented by PEC, achieved full signatory status under the Washington Accord, an international agreement recognizing substantial equivalence among accredited engineering qualifications. This followed reforms introducing Outcome-Based Education and Accreditation, emphasizing graduate attributes, practical competencies, complex engineering problems, and continuous improvement. The achievement was significant. It strengthened international recognition of qualifying Pakistani engineering degrees and established a framework for greater professional mobility. PEC subsequently retained its signatory status for another six years in 2024. This demonstrates how accreditation reforms can generate identifiable benefits beyond administrative compliance.

Yet international recognition and improved educational performance are not identical.

Has outcome-based accreditation measurably improved graduates’ technical competence, innovation capacity, employability, and professional performance?

The distinction matters. International recognition demonstrates confidence in an accreditation system; sustained educational impact requires additional evidence from graduates, employers, professional practice, and longitudinal assessments.

Such evidence should be central to the next phase of reform.

International discussions are increasingly addressing this challenge. The recent ANQAHE Forum in Doha highlighted the relationship between compliance and impact in higher education accreditation.

Importantly, these concepts are not necessarily competing approaches.

Compliance asks whether established standards have been met. Impact asks what meaningful difference meeting those standards has made. If accreditation standards incorporate measurable educational outcomes, demonstrating impact becomes part of compliance itself.

Pakistan must therefore examine whether accreditation processes consistently improve teaching effectiveness, student learning, research relevance, ethical conduct, and graduate competencies. Another important question concerns academic disciplines without dedicated professional accreditation councils. Does the absence of specialized accreditation mean programmes in physics, mathematics, chemistry, humanities, or other disciplines necessarily provide inferior education?

Certainly not.

Educational excellence cannot be reduced to the existence of a regulatory body. Competent faculty, rigorous assessment, academic leadership, research culture, and institutional accountability remain essential regardless of specialized accreditation arrangements. Nevertheless, disciplines without dedicated councils must receive equally credible quality assurance through appropriate institutional and programme-level mechanisms. The administrative burden of accreditation also deserves attention.

Universities invest substantial faculty time and institutional resources in preparing self-assessment reports, maintaining evidence, arranging inspections, and responding to observations. These activities are justified when they support improvement. They become counterproductive when documentation overshadows teaching, research, and student engagement.

A university should not become better at preparing accreditation files than at educating students.

Pakistan’s evolving quality assurance framework offers an opportunity to address these concerns. HEC’s Pakistan Precepts, Standards and Guidelines (PSG-2023), including provisions for reviewing the effectiveness of accreditation bodies, provides a foundation for strengthening accountability. Accreditation councils should increasingly examine demonstrated learning outcomes, graduate competencies, employer feedback, professional performance, and sustained institutional improvement. However, impact assessment must remain context-sensitive. Graduate employment, for instance, depends partly on economic conditions beyond universities’ control. Similarly, research-intensive institutions and universities serving underserved communities may contribute to society in fundamentally different ways. Universities should therefore have reasonable autonomy to define mission-aligned impact indicators within nationally recognized quality standards. Equally importantly, accreditation councils must themselves undergo independent effectiveness evaluations.

How many institutional improvements resulted from accreditation recommendations? Were identified deficiencies subsequently resolved? Did repeated evaluations produce measurable educational gains? Students, employers, and professional organizations should participate meaningfully in answering these questions. Pakistan does not necessarily need more accreditation requirements. It needs smarter standards, stronger evidence, proportionate regulation, and greater emphasis on educational outcomes. Accreditation must remain a safeguard against unacceptable standards, but its highest purpose should be continuous improvement.

The ultimate measure is not how many programmes receive accreditation, how many visits are conducted, or how many reports are submitted. It is whether students learn better, graduates perform better, institutions improve, and society benefits. Until these outcomes become central to accreditation, we risk confusing regulatory compliance with educational excellence.

Pakistan must move beyond asking whether its universities are accredited and begin asking whether accreditation is making its universities better.