Empty Classrooms, Digital Classrooms: Reimagining Higher Education in Pakistan

By Engineer Arshad Hameed Abbasi, International Energy, Climate Change and Water Security Practitioner and Engineer Idrees Abbasi, Former Consultant, World Bank,  and Mr. Amjad Butt, Writer; Secretary General, Murree Literary Council, resident of [address].

 There is a particular kind of grief in watching an institution outlive its usefulness while still drawing a salary, still cutting ribbons, still issuing degrees that mean less each year they are printed. That is where Pakistan’s higher education system stands today, and it is time someone said so plainly: the paradigm has already shifted, quietly, without anyone in Islamabad’s marble offices noticing. It shifted on YouTube, on TED, on edX and Udemy and Khan Academy, in a thousand free lecture halls that never asked a single Pakistani student for tuition, a hostel fee, or four years of their life. The only people who have not caught up are the ones still running the old one. There is a particular kind of grief in watching an institution outlive its usefulness while still drawing a salary, still cutting ribbons, still issuing degrees that mean less each year they are printed. That is where Pakistan’s higher education system stands today, and it is time someone said so plainly: the paradigm has already shifted, quietly, without anyone in Islamabad’s marble offices noticing. It shifted on YouTube, on TED, on edX and Udemy and Khan Academy, in a thousand free lecture halls that never asked a single Pakistani student for tuition, a hostel fee, or four years of their life. The only people who have not caught up are the ones still running the old one.

For decades, the deal offered to a Pakistani student was simple: surrender your time, your family’s savings, and your twenties to a physical campus, and in exchange receive knowledge you could not get anywhere else. That deal is dead. A seventeen-year-old with a smartphone and a working internet connection can now watch a Nobel laureate explain quantum mechanics, follow a structural engineer walk through a seismic design calculation line by line, or sit in on a Stanford lecture on macroeconomics — all free, all on demand, all taught by people who are, in most cases, simply better at their subject than the men and women drawing a professor’s salary in the classroom down the road. The tragedy is not that this content exists. The tragedy is that almost no one in a position of authority ever told the students it was there. For decades, the deal offered to a Pakistani student was simple: surrender your time, your family’s savings, and your twenties to a physical campus, and in exchange receive knowledge you could not get anywhere else. That deal is dead. A seventeen-year-old with a smartphone and a working internet connection can now watch a Nobel laureate explain quantum mechanics, follow a structural engineer walk through a seismic design calculation line by line, or sit in on a Stanford lecture on macroeconomics — all free, all on demand, all taught by people who are, in most cases, simply better at their subject than the men and women drawing a professor’s salary in the classroom down the road. The tragedy is not that this content exists. The tragedy is that almost no one in a position of authority ever told the students it was there.

Ask yourself honestly: when was the last time a Vice Chancellor stood in front of a first-year class and said, “Before you trust anything I teach you, go watch the version of this lecture that MIT put online for free, and come back and tell me if I taught it better”? It has not happened, and it will not happen, because the entire architecture of Pakistani higher education depends on students not asking that question. It depends on the fiction that a degree is the same thing as an education, that a seat in a lecture hall for four years is the same thing as understanding, and that an institution’s worth can be measured in acres of campus rather than in what a graduate can actually do when the exam is over and the job begins.Ask yourself honestly: when was the last time a Vice Chancellor stood in front of a first-year class and said, “Before you trust anything I teach you, go watch the version of this lecture that MIT put online for free, and come back and tell me if I taught it better”? It has not happened, and it will not happen, because the entire architecture of Pakistani higher education depends on students not asking that question. It depends on the fiction that a degree is the same thing as an education, that a seat in a lecture hall for four years is the same thing as understanding, and that an institution’s worth can be measured in acres of campus rather than in what a graduate can actually do when the exam is over and the job begins.

We do not need to guess what an alternative looks like, because the world has already built it. Universities that were once measured by the size of their footprint are now measured by the depth of their content and the reach of their delivery. Institutions like the National University of Singapore have shown that a compact, space-efficient campus married to serious digital delivery outperforms sprawling, underused infrastructure every time. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, students still find themselves inside partially built mega-campuses, sitting in half-used lecture halls, being taught by professors whose most recent research contribution was a maintenance grant, while the actual global classroom — free, current, taught by the best minds alive — sits one browser tab away, untouched, unmentioned, unrecommended by the very people whose job it was to point students toward it.We do not need to guess what an alternative looks like, because the world has already built it. Universities that were once measured by the size of their footprint are now measured by the depth of their content and the reach of their delivery. Institutions like the National University of Singapore have shown that a compact, space-efficient campus married to serious digital delivery outperforms sprawling, underused infrastructure every time. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, students still find themselves inside partially built mega-campuses, sitting in half-used lecture halls, being taught by professors whose most recent research contribution was a maintenance grant, while the actual global classroom — free, current, taught by the best minds alive — sits one browser tab away, untouched, unmentioned, unrecommended by the very people whose job it was to point students toward it.

Two cases make this failure impossible to wave away as an abstraction. At Kohsar University, Murree, students told us plainly, in their own words, that the free video lectures on their phones taught them more, more clearly, and more usefully than what they were receiving inside the classroom — a university sitting at over 7,600 feet that has still, decades into Murree’s existence, never grown into the institution its setting deserves. At the University of Chakwal, the pattern inverted but the failure was the same: a campus built out past any enrollment or capacity that could plausibly justify it, laboratories and halls constructed for a student body that was never going to fill them, infrastructure mistaken for education. Neither institution has ever published a key performance indicator for its own leadership. Neither has ever been asked, in public, to show what a graduate can actually do that a free online course could not have taught them just as well, at a fraction of the cost, without the concrete. These are not isolated embarrassments. They are what happens, predictably, when a system rewards the square footage of a campus and asks nothing at all about the square inch of a student’s actual understanding.

So let us say the uncomfortable thing plainly: it is time to shelve the old model of the Higher Education Commission as a degree-issuing, campus-building bureaucracy, and replace its actual function — the thing it was supposed to do, which is help Pakistani students become genuinely educated — with something built for how learning actually happens now. Not a ministry. A server. A single, serious, well-curated national learning platform, free at the point of use, open eighteen hours a day if that is what students need, that does not try to compete with MIT or Stanford by pretending to reinvent their content, but instead does the one thing no foreign platform will ever do for us: organise the best already-existing open lectures, video demonstrations, and practical walkthroughs in science, social science, and engineering into a coherent, Pakistan-relevant curriculum, mapped to the concepts our students actually need to master, in the language and context they actually live in. So let us say the uncomfortable thing plainly: it is time to shelve the old model of the Higher Education Commission as a degree-issuing, campus-building bureaucracy, and replace its actual function — the thing it was supposed to do, which is help Pakistani students become genuinely educated — with something built for how learning actually happens now. Not a ministry. A server. A single, serious, well-curated national learning platform, free at the point of use, open eighteen hours a day if that is what students need, that does not try to compete with MIT or Stanford by pretending to reinvent their content, but instead does the one thing no foreign platform will ever do for us: organise the best already-existing open lectures, video demonstrations, and practical walkthroughs in science, social science, and engineering into a coherent, Pakistan-relevant curriculum, mapped to the concepts our students actually need to master, in the language and context they actually live in.

This is not a call to abandon rigour. It is the opposite. A physics student who has only ever heard a formula recited in a crowded lecture hall, half-copied into a notebook before the professor moved on, has not learned physics. A physics student who has watched the same concept demonstrated three different ways, by three different teachers, with the actual apparatus shown on screen, pausing and rewinding until the idea finally sits still in their mind — that student has built a foundation. Engineering above all cannot survive on recitation. A structural engineer who has never watched a real failure analysis, a real load test, a real demonstration of how a beam actually bends before it breaks, is not being trained; they are being credentialed. Video does not replace the workshop and the laboratory. But it can, for the first time in this country’s history, replace the lecture hall — and free every laboratory hour we do have for the demonstrations and hands-on work that video genuinely cannot substitute.This is not a call to abandon rigour. It is the opposite. A physics student who has only ever heard a formula recited in a crowded lecture hall, half-copied into a notebook before the professor moved on, has not learned physics. A physics student who has watched the same concept demonstrated three different ways, by three different teachers, with the actual apparatus shown on screen, pausing and rewinding until the idea finally sits still in their mind — that student has built a foundation. Engineering above all cannot survive on recitation. A structural engineer who has never watched a real failure analysis, a real load test, a real demonstration of how a beam actually bends before it breaks, is not being trained; they are being credentialed. Video does not replace the workshop and the laboratory. But it can, for the first time in this country’s history, replace the lecture hall — and free every laboratory hour we do have for the demonstrations and hands-on work that video genuinely cannot substitute.

There will be objections, and they deserve an honest answer rather than a dismissal. Not every student has reliable internet or electricity, and any serious version of this proposal has to reckon with that gap before it reckons with anything else — through offline downloadable content, through campus-based access points, through partnerships that get connectivity to the students who need it most, not just the ones already comfortable online. Employers will ask what a credential from a national learning platform is actually worth, and that question deserves a real answer built on assessed competence, not just video views — proctored testing, practical demonstration of skill, verified project work, the things a degree was supposed to certify in the first place but too often no longer does. None of these are reasons to abandon the idea. They are the actual work that a serious version of this reform requires, and work is not the same as impossibility. There will be objections, and they deserve an honest answer rather than a dismissal. Not every student has reliable internet or electricity, and any serious version of this proposal has to reckon with that gap before it reckons with anything else — through offline downloadable content, through campus-based access points, through partnerships that get connectivity to the students who need it most, not just the ones already comfortable online. Employers will ask what a credential from a national learning platform is actually worth, and that question deserves a real answer built on assessed competence, not just video views — proctored testing, practical demonstration of skill, verified project work, the things a degree was supposed to certify in the first place but too often no longer does. None of these are reasons to abandon the idea. They are the actual work that a serious version of this reform requires, and work is not the same as impossibility.

The same platform should not stop at science, social science, and engineering. A generation of Pakistani graduates fluent only in Urdu and English is a generation quietly locked out of most of the world’s job market before they ever apply. The same server that teaches a student how a bridge carries load should teach them French, Arabic, German, and Spanish — not as an elective luxury reserved for the children of the wealthy who can afford a private language centre, but as a core, freely available track alongside every other subject. Arabic opens the Gulf, where millions of Pakistanis already work and where fluency, not just labour, would let the next generation move from construction sites into boardrooms. French and German open Francophone Africa, Europe, and some of the world’s strongest engineering and manufacturing economies. Spanish opens a market of over twenty countries. A doctor, an engineer, or a teacher who can work competently in a second or third language is not just more employable; they are a form of export Pakistan has barely begun to take seriously, at a moment when remittances already keep large parts of this economy standing. Language, taught the same way as physics or engineering — through structured practice, real conversation, and consistent daily exposure rather than a single memorised semester — is not a soft addition to this platform. It is one of its most economically serious purposes. The same platform should not stop at science, social science, and engineering. A generation of Pakistani graduates fluent only in Urdu and English is a generation quietly locked out of most of the world’s job market before they ever apply. The same server that teaches a student how a bridge carries load should teach them French, Arabic, German, and Spanish — not as an elective luxury reserved for the children of the wealthy who can afford a private language centre, but as a core, freely available track alongside every other subject. Arabic opens the Gulf, where millions of Pakistanis already work and where fluency, not just labour, would let the next generation move from construction sites into boardrooms. French and German open Francophone Africa, Europe, and some of the world’s strongest engineering and manufacturing economies. Spanish opens a market of over twenty countries. A doctor, an engineer, or a teacher who can work competently in a second or third language is not just more employable; they are a form of export Pakistan has barely begun to take seriously, at a moment when remittances already keep large parts of this economy standing. Language, taught the same way as physics or engineering — through structured practice, real conversation, and consistent daily exposure rather than a single memorised semester — is not a soft addition to this platform. It is one of its most economically serious purposes.

This is not a proposal offered from the sidelines. Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi and his son, Engineer Musa Arshad Abbasi, are themselves at work building a version of exactly this server — a platform designed to hold a student’s attention on genuine learning for ten to twelve hours a day, not through compulsion, but by making the material good enough, current enough, and practical enough that it earns that time honestly. Alongside its science, social science, and engineering content, it is being built to carry the same four languages — French, Arabic, German, and Spanish — as a core part of what it teaches, not an afterthought. It is offered here not as a hypothetical for someone else to eventually build, but as a project already underway, by a father and son who have spent their own careers watching this country’s institutions fail to do what a determined family, and a server, might yet manage to do instead.This is not a proposal offered from the sidelines. Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi and his son, Engineer Musa Arshad Abbasi, are themselves at work building a version of exactly this server — a platform designed to hold a student’s attention on genuine learning for ten to twelve hours a day, not through compulsion, but by making the material good enough, current enough, and practical enough that it earns that time honestly. Alongside its science, social science, and engineering content, it is being built to carry the same four languages — French, Arabic, German, and Spanish — as a core part of what it teaches, not an afterthought. It is offered here not as a hypothetical for someone else to eventually build, but as a project already underway, by a father and son who have spent their own careers watching this country’s institutions fail to do what a determined family, and a server, might yet manage to do instead.

What should not survive this conversation is the assumption that Pakistan’s talent is the problem. It never was. This country’s young people have proven, again and again, that given the right tools they can compete with anyone on earth — in mathematics olympiads, in engineering, in the quiet, determined way a generation has taught itself to code and design and build using nothing more than a phone and a data plan, often despite their universities rather than because of them. What has failed them is an institutional imagination frozen in the era of the physical lecture hall, defending its own relevance long after the students it was meant to serve had already logged on somewhere else and started learning without it.What should not survive this conversation is the assumption that Pakistan’s talent is the problem. It never was. This country’s young people have proven, again and again, that given the right tools they can compete with anyone on earth — in mathematics olympiads, in engineering, in the quiet, determined way a generation has taught itself to code and design and build using nothing more than a phone and a data plan, often despite their universities rather than because of them. What has failed them is an institutional imagination frozen in the era of the physical lecture hall, defending its own relevance long after the students it was meant to serve had already logged on somewhere else and started learning without it.

The lecture hall is empty now, in every way that matters. The only kindness left is to finally admit it, and build something that meets these students where they already are. The lecture hall is empty now, in every way that matters. The only kindness left is to finally admit it, and build something that meets these students where they already are.