Pakistan is at a very crucial point of development in which there is a big paradox. As the country faces a deep rooted and intertwined water security, sustainable energy, food production, and health issues, its strategic investment in human capital is not in line with its interests. Statistics provided by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics have demonstrated the fact that Pakistan maintains a high level of outbound mobility of students in South Asia, with a significantly large percentage of its most promising graduates applying to other countries in search of master’s and doctoral degrees. Though this is an effective channel towards personal career growth, it creates a loop of brain drain that, in most cases, causes permanent loss of talent and a general misfit between foreign obtained skills and the local ground-based needs that Pakistan has. A strategic need to come out of this paradox must be achieved through radical strategic reorientation to the mission, promoted by the Higher Education Commission (HEC): a firm determination to enhance the strength of indigenous MSc and PhD programs, tactically complemented by organized, short-term overseas research exposure to avoid academic insularity.
The scepticism about local graduate education, with references to the obsolete infrastructure and poor research culture, is no longer a reflection of the on-the-ground reality of the last twenty years. Since its inception in 2002, HEC has been able to spearhead high and continuous investment in the physical and human capital of the public universities. The development spending on higher education has remained one of the priorities, as indicated by the governmental reports such as the Pakistan Economic Survey 2022-23. The results are physical: the Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Universities of Engineering and Technology (UETs) and major agricultural and general universities now have the capability to run their laboratories and research facilities to the same level as highly respected international centers of excellence in areas of critical national development, such as biotechnology, materials science and engineering. More importantly, it has become established with a quantifiable research culture. The performance reports of the HEC themselves testify to an incredible jump in the volume of national research work, since in Scopus-indexed journals, less than 2,000 citable documents were produced in 2002; in 2021, more than 27,000. At the same time, PhDs are now produced annually at a rate higher than 1,800, which is a tenfold increase since the beginning of the 2000s. Such expansion is supported by merit-based grants such as the National Research Programme for Universities (NRPU) and Technology Development Fund (TDF).
The tactical case of the importance of these homegrown programs is powerful and multi-dimensional. First of all, it makes sure that the top-level research in the country is suited and applicable to the most urgent issues. In foreign universities, there is no way in which research agendas are influenced by priorities, financing environments, and geographical circumstances of their countries of residence. Comparatively, a doctoral degree in water resource management taught in Pakistan on its own Indus Basin and using local data sets and taught by faculty who are very well acquainted with the socio-political and environmental realities of the area will produce actionable information to the policymaker and community much more readily than a degree offered in some other river system halfway around the world. Pakistan Vision 2030 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the key pillars of the national frameworks that can be structurally organized as indigenous programs and direct the intellectual capital towards mission-focused issues such as creating drought-resistant crops, diagnosing endemic diseases, or developing renewable energy grids at affordable prices.
This model is not only relevant, but it has high cost-effectiveness and an effective talent retention mechanism. The entire expense to sponsor one doctoral student in North America or Europe, including high tuition fees and living costs, can cover multiple high-quality indigenous PhD fellowships. More to the point, researchers who complete their formative research years integrated into the local academic and social networks exhibit a much greater tendency to pursue long-term careers in the ecosystem of research and development in Pakistan. Although international mobility is still a valuable quality, a more robust domestic graduate system leads to a positive brain circulation effect. In this model, scholars go abroad for special, advanced training or cooperation, but they are encouraged to go home to well-established groups with substantial capital to conduct research that can lead to permanent loss of human capital and create the critical mass of knowledge required to innovate.
Lastly, long-term capacity building of the institution can only be achieved through indigenous doctoral education. It forms a self-perpetuating cycle of virtue in that senior professors mentor PhD-level students, who are later appointed to the faculty of the next generation of the national university system. This is an endogenous growth that strengthens the departments in an organic and predictable manner, so that the teaching and research come to respond directly to the needs of the local academic and national development. On the other side, excessive dependence on foreign-trained PhDs to replace the faculty is a volatile policy; this method may not cover the particular departmental needs, and the probability of turnover is high since the returning scholars may encounter challenges of re-entering the workforce or may be tempted by other options.
The support of strong local programs should not be confused with academic isolationism. World-class research can only be done with global exposure and collaboration. The strategic innovation is thus the fact that it is a built-in, systematic six-month research trip to a highly technological collaborative institution overseas that is part of the heart of the local PhD programme. This type of hybrid model provides focused advantages – practical training and use of specialized equipment, exposure to high-throughput research settings, and the development of enduring international partnerships – without cutting off the main academic foundation of the scholar. The home base of the programme is on firm ground in the country of origin, which is Pakistan: the research problem is locally specified, the main supervision is local, and an explicit return requirement helps in the systematization of the repatriation of learned skills and knowledge as well as international networks. This is a strategic and economical approach to technology transfer and the integration of world science.
To translate this vision into practice requires that the HEC deal with endemic systemic challenges through steel-hardened policy determination. To begin with, the growth of doctoral programmes should be accompanied by an intolerance to quality assurance. This must involve making the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) do a strict anonymous external thesis evaluation by forums that will also have international scholars. Funding of universities should also be more closely related to the quantifiable outcomes of research quality publications, patenting, and provisional contributions to society, but not just the enrolment rates. Second, the sustainable financing model should be instituted. The HEC should also be a tireless supporter of increasing the national spending on research and development in Pakistan, which is at present under 0.16% of the GDP, to the international average of 2.5%, and it should also design potent fiscal and regulatory support for industry-academia collaborations and collaborate in funding applied research. Thirdly, the key to quality is constant faculty growth. Faculty sabbatical programs in the major international centres should be institutionalized so that even the supervisors are at the forefront of their respective areas.
The process of sustainable development and economic sovereignty thereof in Pakistan cannot be outsourced. It requires the nurturing of a generation of scientists and problem solvers who are educated to use profound scientific understanding of the specifics of the country. The HEC can fully reinvent universities as degree-awarding institutions by leading high-quality, well-resourced, and globally connected indigenous graduate programs that would make universities engines of national innovation. This calculated, strategic methodology enables the empowerment of the local institutions, spurs talent retention, and results in the creation of globally competitive researchers with their main interest in the future of Pakistan. The groundwork is already done; what is now desperately needed is the commitment of the HEC together with the government and the business community at large to investing in the most resourceful aspect of the country, or more precisely, in the intellectual strength of the folks at home, so that the prosperity of the mother country can be achieved.
Writer Bio:
The writer of this article is a Professor in the Civil Engineering Department, University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.
Email: khanshahzada@uetpeshawar.edu.pk
