Education: the challenge of quality

Education: the Challenge of Quality

By

Shahid Siddiqui

The problem of access had always been a serious challenge for the educational system of Pakistan, where even historically at the primary level millions of students could not make it to school.

At the higher education level, the situation was even tougher. In 1947, we had only two universities but now we can boast of having almost 200 degree-awarding universities/institutes. With this quantitative expansion, there arose some serious questions of quality.  In the recent past, with very generous funding from the Higher Education Commission for PhD programmes, certain educational institutions found it an opportune time to enrol students into their ill-prepared and hastily offered programmes. These programmes had sufficient resources in terms of qualified regular faculty, a good contemporary library, and facilities for scholars like space and access to the internet.