Pakistan's two real university problems are governance and quality

Why this conversation matters more than the usual education debate

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as personally important to him. Pakistan, he says, is sitting on a youth bulge that is either the country’s greatest opportunity or its greatest threat, with five million children turning eighteen every year. The numbers sound generous in the abstract — sixty-five percent of the population is young — but the abstraction collapses the moment you ask what those young people are actually going to do with their lives.

He sets up the central tension cleanly. If Pakistan does not educate this generation and make it productive, the country ends up with a vast consumer base and no productive backbone. The country has been arguing about universities versus skills, about employability, about whether degrees still make sense in a world where the work itself is changing. Muzamil wants to know what Pakistan is actually doing inside that argument, and so he brings in the person responsible for the answer: Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed, Chairman of the Higher Education Commission.

Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed’s route into the system he now runs

Before the policy conversation, Muzamil asks about the man across the table. The answer is unexpectedly granular. Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed was born in a small village near Attock, the son of a family that had migrated from occupied Kashmir in 1947. He went to a Tata-run school he still mentions with some pride, did his FSc in Muzaffarabad, and started his career as a lecturer at a college in Rawalpindi because he wanted to teach.

Three years in, USAID scholarships were announced. He applied, was selected, and ended up at UC Riverside, where he completed a PhD in phytochemistry on medicinal plants and, almost as a side project, an MS in business after helping a homesick classmate move to Santa Clara. He turned down job offers in the United States and came home. “I came back immediately after education,” he tells Muzamil. The career that followed ran through Hamdard, the founding of COMSATS Institute of Information Technology — where he was the first professor — and an early HEC post under the founding chairman Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman.

The diplomatic chapter is the one most listeners will not know. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s education arm, ISESCO, headquartered in Rabat, runs a nomination-and-vote process across fifty-four member countries for senior posts. Pakistan put his name forward. He won the vote, became Deputy Director General, and the Government of Pakistan granted his family diplomatic status. He served two years of a six-year term before the government recalled him. He came back, became HEC’s executive director, then chairman from 2014 to 2018, returned briefly to ISESCO, came back again during COVID, and was reappointed chairman in 2022.

The macro numbers, in his own framing

Muzamil walks in with a depressing baseline number: out of the five million Pakistani eighteen-year-olds each year, around two and a half million never reach any university at all. He asks Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed to put the macro picture in context.

The chairman accepts the framing but reframes the comparison. In 2002, when the University Grants Commission was upgraded into HEC on the back of a World Bank report, Pakistan had roughly fifty-one universities, public and private combined. Tertiary education access — the share of eighteen-to-twenty-three-year-olds in any university — was 2.1 percent. The mandate handed to the new commission was three-fold: expand access, improve equity, and lift quality. Today, he says, Pakistan has 272 universities and access is somewhere between twelve and thirteen percent. That is still below India and Bangladesh, but it is a six-fold expansion against a backdrop of terrorism, financial crises, and floods that he refuses to use as excuses.

The number that genuinely surprises Muzamil is research output. In 2002, Pakistan’s five hundred-plus institutions collectively produced roughly eight hundred and fifty publications a year. The figure today is around forty thousand annually in indexed journals, and Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed is careful to note that the country has moved past chasing volume.

The gender parity flip

The most striking equity story in the conversation is the gender shift. In 2002, Pakistani universities were sixty-eight percent male and thirty-two percent female, and women were funnelled into a handful of fields — medicine, nursing, education, home economics. Engineering, agriculture, and space technology were treated as male territory.

Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed gives the current number with visible pride. “Forty-eight percent female folks are in the university system and fifty-two are male,” he tells Muzamil, and he is happy to add that women are now in every field that was once closed to them, and that at almost any convocation in Pakistan, the top positions are taken by women. He is half-serious when he says he sometimes argues, in lighter moments, that the country may soon need reverse discrimination — a quota system for boys.

It is one of the moments in the episode where the chairman drops the regulator’s caution. The flip happened, in his telling, because half the country’s population decided it wanted to be in the mainstream — and the system was open enough to let that decision register.

From impact factor to impact

When Muzamil asks where the system is currently failing, Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed answers without hedging. “We have two issues,” he says. “Governance and quality.” He is explicit that he refuses to put money at the top of the list, because pretending the problem is money is how Pakistani institutions duck responsibility for the things they actually control.

The slogan inside HEC has shifted accordingly. For years, the line to professors and researchers was that they should publish in higher-impact journals. Now the line is different. “From impact factor to impact,” he says. He repeats it to his researchers. Research that does not start with a human problem in mind — research done to thicken a CV — is, in his words, wasting government money and institution time. He admits this culture is not fully changed, but he insists it is moving.

On governance and quality assurance, he points to a partnership with the UK Quality Assurance Agency through the British Council that has produced a sixteen-parameter framework with hundreds of indicators, now approved by the commission and being rolled out for audit-based public reporting on universities.

The reporting Pakistan never sees about itself

Muzamil and Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed circle a frustration that clearly sits with the chairman: the negativity bias of Pakistani coverage of its own education system. He gives a clean example. For four consecutive years, Pakistan has been the number one country in the European Union’s Erasmus Plus scholarship intake, beating India, China, and over a hundred other competing countries. He says this has gone almost entirely unreported at home.

The same week, a headline ran in a major newspaper saying no Pakistani university had made the global top 350. Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed walks through what the longer arc actually shows. In 2019, Pakistan had three universities in the global top thousand. The number rose to five, then seven, then fourteen in 2024-25. He expects eighteen this year. “The news should have been that Pakistan went from fourteen to eighteen,” he says, and he is willing to bet that within a few years at least one Pakistani university will crack the top 200 to 250 band — at which point, he predicts, the headline will simply move to the top hundred.

It is not a complaint about the press, exactly. It is a complaint that the country itself is not bothering to notice the parts of the story that are working.

The associate degree misperception

Halfway through, Muzamil raises the two-year associate degree that has been getting public attention as if it were a new policy and asks how it differs from the old BA. Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed corrects the framing carefully. The associate-degree exit has existed in Pakistani higher education since 2005. Every four-year bachelor’s program in the country has a legal exit point after the second year, at which a student can take an associate degree and leave, then return later and join the fifth semester to complete the sixteen-year qualification.

The reason families think it is new, he says, is that universities never told students this exit existed. “Education has become a business,” he tells Muzamil. The four-year structure protected revenue. The exit point was on the books, but it was not on the brochure.

He gives a sympathetic use case. A young woman whose family wants her married after two years can take the associate degree and leave with a credential rather than nothing, and return later if she wants to finish. The option was always there. The system simply did not tell her.

The new IT degree: eighty percent hands-on, twenty percent theory

The most concrete forward-looking piece of the conversation is a new two-year program HEC has redesigned with the Prime Minister’s office. Pakistan needed an IT credential where the syllabus genuinely tracked what employers wanted. The redesigned program flips the historic ratio. It is eighty percent hands-on skill and twenty percent theory, launching this fall, and Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed says the cabinet briefing for the Prime Minister has already happened.

He connects it to a wider point Muzamil has been pressing on: where Pakistan can actually compete. Industrial competition with China, given Pakistan’s labour costs, energy costs, and raw-material availability, is not a winnable contest. Services is. There is real global demand — he names Japan, Germany, and France as countries actively asking him for IT engineers — and Pakistan’s young people, he insists, have the underlying capacity. The infrastructure to train them is now in place: two data centres housed inside universities (one in Lahore and one at NED in Karachi), a hybrid three-tier cloud setup, and an AI-enabled supercomputer. The Prime Minister is scheduled to formally inaugurate the build later this month.

The structural cap on Pakistan’s services export

Muzamil presses on a comparison he has been studying closely: India. The Indian services export is approaching three hundred and fifty billion dollars a year. Pakistan’s barely touches five billion. The Indian economy is roughly ten times the size, so the apples-to-apples expectation might be thirty-five billion. The gap is not explained by macro size alone.

His argument is that Pakistan’s top talent leaves, the mid-tier is too small, and the volume needed to push services exports anywhere near India’s scale simply does not exist. To hit thirty-five billion dollars in software services, Pakistan needs roughly a million working engineers. The country graduates around fifty thousand a year, before the employability filter cuts that further. Every time a crisis hits, the system loses what little investment runway it had.

He layers a second observation that he stresses is what foreign employers actually tell him. Skills are not the bottleneck people assume. The bottleneck is communication — he gives the example of Indian workers in Russia learning Russian while Pakistanis hold out for English — and work ethic. Discipline, punctuality, and reliable follow-through are what overseas employers say is missing, and that is harder to fix in a curriculum than a software stack is.

Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed does not dispute the diagnosis. He pushes back gently on the freelancer framing — “freelancer is a state of mind,” Muzamil offers, and the chairman picks up the thread — and insists the slogan HEC is now repeating to students is the right one: don’t look for a job, create jobs. Multi-million-rupee companies are now spinning out of university campuses, he says, and that is the shape of the answer he wants the system to grow toward.

The window

There is a phrase the chairman returns to twice in the episode that lands harder than anything else he says. “Welcome in Pakistan,” he says, with a half-smile, every time he is about to admit something the system did badly. He is not being cynical. He is naming the gap between what the policy framework allows and what the institutions actually deliver.

By the end of the conversation, the through-line is clear. Pakistan’s higher education system is no longer in the place it was in 2002. Access has expanded six-fold. Gender parity is something most peer countries would envy. Research output has multiplied by roughly forty-seven. The infrastructure to train students on the technologies that will define the next decade is now physically on the ground.

What has not changed at the same speed is governance, quality at the median institution, and the country’s willingness to tell itself an accurate story about what is working. Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed gives himself, the sector, and Pakistan a narrow window. “Maximum one year, one and a half year,” he says. Either the system adjusts to the speed at which the world is now moving, or it becomes history. He is, characteristically, optimistic that it will adjust. He is also, characteristically, not interested in pretending the adjustment is automatic.

Muzamil closes by thanking him for the time and the candour. The conversation lands where it started: on the five million eighteen-year-olds arriving every year, and on the man whose job is to make sure the system meeting them is one they can actually use.