Welfare State and Education

Under the Constitution of Pakistan, health and education are basic rights of the public. It is the fundamental responsibility of the state to provide them. Since 1947, when Pakistan came into existence, there were only two universities in West Pakistan. Today, the number has increased to 278 universities across Pakistan, including both public and private sectors.

Here, the most important question arises: how many of them are truly functioning as public universities with minimal fee barriers? Unfortunately, most educational institutions in Pakistan have become commercial entities.

Whereas education is a basic right, if we compare with our region, a small country like Sri Lanka has achieved a remarkable goal by providing free basic education to almost 99% of its population. This means all students who wish to attend public schools are entitled to free education. As per the UNICEF report, 22.6 million children in Pakistan are out of school. This is a very alarming situation, almost 10% of our total population, especially the youth, has no opportunity to go to school. Even if we see the era of the British regime, when there were many missionary schools all over the region. Wherever they built a cathedral, they also established a school beside it. Even the colleges and universities of that time are still known to be among the best. Countries that spend the most on education include the Scandinavian countries and also a country we consider our rival, Israel, which spends a large portion of its GDP on research and education. Pakistan allocates almost 3% of its total budget to education, whereas globally 6% to 7% of a country’s GDP is dedicated to education. Even out of that 3%, whenever the government faces a fiscal deficit, it prefers to cut the education budget even further. There was a time when Pakistani universities were ranked among the top 100 universities in the world. But now, among the top 500, there is only one university from Pakistan. Is this not a reflection of the seriousness that the government shows towards education? The government’s education policy provides privileges to the private sector by allowing them to establish universities, but here the real problem arises. All these private universities have become money-making machines, with no quota for deserving students under the right to education. Even the fees for

technical education such as medical and engineering have become much higher than global standards. Many of our students are seeking opportunities in universities around the world, not only in America, Canada, or Europe, but also in Central Asia and China, where they feel more comfortable, paying less fees than in Pakistan while receiving better quality education. We have merely licensed universities and created an environment where higher education is not within the reach of talented students. Even in government universities where fees are lower, the number of seats is limited and the merit is extremely high. With this kind of situation, we are not able to produce enough graduates, masters, and PhD scholars. In my consideration, this situation is going to become worse, our Gen-Z, despite having talent and ability, will not be entitled to get admission to any university due to the gigantic fee structure they cannot afford. Moreover, our industrial sector is not linked with academia in terms of raising research and development and providing enough funds to support this area in the private sector. Despite paying such high fees, our students are still not able to achieve the level of education they deserve. I would like to mention again that the research and development sector in all these universities is almost at zero percent. Pakistan’s R&D budget against GDP is almost 0.016%%, which shows our level of commitment. Since education is also a part of CPEC(BRI), under that framework we need to enhance our collaboration with China, not only by exchanging delegations of students but more importantly through the exchange of trainees and faculty. Especially our faculty needs to learn how China successfully reformed its education system, and how today some of the most distinguished universities in the world are not from Europe or America, but from China. We need to develop educational relations and research-based interaction between these two friendly countries to get the best results for our educational departments by bringing more interactive knowledge to our universities. In this regard, the government is more focused on the exchange of students; however, my opinion is different. The educational staff, who are the real backbone of any education system, need to adopt the educational strategy being used by China, which has been successful in generating a sustainable and effective system.