Universities must evolve, not disappear

The Return to Defend Universities

Muzamil brings Azad Chaiwala back after the response to their first episode reached 75,000 views and 550 comments. Ninety percent of viewers agreed with Azad’s earlier stance that degrees alone fail the market; the remaining ten percent were not hateful but “misunderstood”, Muzamil says. This time, they revisit the question more carefully. Azad has evolved his position. He no longer argues universities should disappear. He argues they must become efficient.

“I need these universities,” Azad says directly, reversing the tone of their earlier conversation. “We have a deficiency of almost 70 to 80 million children who are totally burdened in the world.”

The Clarity on Entrepreneurs

The first confusion Azad addresses: people believe he says every person should become a businessman. He does not. “Every person doesn’t have a trait,” he says. “I want them to be two things. Either skilled. They will become so good in their work. Whatever they do, they will become the best of them.”

For those who wish to run businesses, the same logic applies. But the country needs skilled workers as foundation. When Azad built his company with two billion users, he could not find developers in Pakistan or India. “I had 12 vacancies for game developers, but I don’t get it,” he says, describing the caliber problem directly.

Universities Now Move Too Slowly

The core issue: university takes four to five years to teach material that is already stale. “When I was sitting here in 2001, I wasn’t earning anything. It was 2000 and 2001 when I said, oh, we get more ads, so we get money,” Azad says. But universities teaching digital marketing in 2021 use curriculum that is decades behind. “They’re bringing up-to-date books, because they themselves are incompetent,” he says. “Change requires work.”

Muzamil describes the problem another way: students learn from books published in 1997 while in 2021. Twenty-year-old material becomes “obsolete” before the student graduates. One child tells Azad: “I did a 3,000 rupee course that taught me how to sell on Fiverr. Today I gained 1,000 dollars, and I’m only 16 years old. Why didn’t we teach it in school?”

The Parent and Mentality Barrier

Ninety percent of children in university are there against their preference, forced by parents who see degrees as insurance. Azad asks: “What did you teach me? Did you teach me research? Did you teach me Google?” The homework culture does not build thinking. It builds compliance.

But this is not the children’s fault. “Fathers, please make friends of their children,” Azad urges. Parents must show their kids what productivity looks like. “At the age of 16, when they get to know what they want to do, this isn’t what they want to do, they have to pay their attention. They have to pay their homework so many times. What did you learn from today? Be their friends.”

The Real Solution: Compress and Teach Skills

Azad offers two paths forward. The first is miraculous: if appointed education minister, he would give universities three months to shift to practical learning and skill-based curriculum, or he would shut them down. The second is realistic: he opened institutes and plans to open more across Karachi, Faisalabad, Peshawar, Lahore, and Islamabad. “I open 20 more. I can educate 1,000,000 kids.”

But one million is not seventy million. That is why he pivoted to video. “I make videos. I make a great quality video,” he says. In one weekend, he taught video editing free to 20,000 people. “That’s the power of the video that we have learned.”

The Free Education Model

The model Azad is testing: record high-quality courses, deliver them free to anyone earning under 40,000 rupees monthly (with documentation), and offer them to the rest at low cost. He will start with children under 16 in his own city. “During school time, we will teach video and graphics design. Two weeks we will teach you a programmer.”

He knows the facility barrier. Schools do not have computers with graphics cards. He is prepared to provide them. The proof of concept already worked: thousands watched his free weekend course. “It was well, well received. Half an hour class, and well over 20,000 people.”

The Mentality Shift on Money

One tension remains unresolved between Muzamil and Azad: whether telling children their worth depends on earning money is motivating or harmful. Azad believes it is necessary. “You have no worth in society if you can’t earn money.” Muzamil worries it becomes a materialist absolute. Yet both agree: money follows those who are productive, not those who hold credentials. And credentials without productivity fail.

The conversation ends on alignment: Azad is not abandoning universities; he is refusing to accept slow, obsolete ones. Muzamil sees that shift as progress. “I hope that, inshallah, we’ll be able to get to incredibly great things in the future,” he says. “We will disagree, we will agree, we will all do something, but inshallah our end will all be done.”