The global degree most Pakistani students never consider

A development economist who chose to counsel one family at a time

Muzamil opens the episode by laying out two reasons he wanted Shanza N. Khan on the show. The first is her background in development economics, poverty alleviation, and the structural questions he keeps circling — what would actually move the needle on hardcore poverty in Pakistan. The second is more personal to his own thesis: she runs Ion IV, an organisation that helps Pakistani students get to top universities abroad, and Muzamil is a long-standing advocate of sending Pakistanis out. He doesn’t buy the brain-drain story. People who leave come back as remittances, as soft power, as a diaspora a country can draw on later.

Khan’s own résumé makes the pivot to education look unlikely. She did her undergraduate economics degree at Emory, starting at seventeen and graduating top of her class with a summa cum laude. A master’s in public policy from Harvard followed. Professionally she moved through the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, the World Bank in Washington and then Islamabad, the Asian Development Bank, and the Aga Khan Development Network — twenty-two years on the macroeconomic, fiscal, and poverty side.

So why education consultancy? “If you want to make a difference in people’s lives,” she tells Muzamil, “for me at least, it had to be that interaction, one family at a time.” The trigger was concrete. When she moved back to Pakistan, her eldest daughter was in class eight, and Khan went to the school asking what internship and volunteer opportunities existed for a student that age. The counsellors looked at her as if she’d come too early. Having been through American admissions herself, she knew otherwise.

Why the clock starts in grade nine

The misconception Khan most wants to correct is about timing. Families believe only the final O level and A level grades count. In fact, for American admissions, transcripts count from grade nine onward, and the surrounding work — internships, volunteering, research, competitions — has to start that early too. “Unless you start at this particular age,” she says, the rest becomes salvage. If a student walks in at A2, it’s too late to do anything but work with what’s there.

This is what Ion IV’s profile-building division exists for. It works with students from class nine to eleven, starting with psychometric testing to separate what a child actually wants to study from what Pakistani parents assume is financially safe — medicine, engineering, computers. Khan is a mother of three and includes herself in the diagnosis. The tests point toward a fit; the next year is spent stress-testing it on the ground through internships and shadowships related to that field.

That on-ground reality check is the part she keeps returning to. A student set on medicine does a week of shadowing in a public hospital — King Edward, Fatima Jinnah — and contacts her, rattled by the heat and the conditions after a lifetime in air-conditioned schools. Some pivot to bioengineering or research. Others come back more certain than before. Either way, starting in grade nine leaves time to find out. The arrangement with partner organisations is built so the student earns the letter rather than collecting it: no learning, no letter. It’s the opposite of the chacha-mamu internship that produces a certificate and nothing else.

One country is the mistake

When the conversation turns to the financial crisis and students who can no longer afford fees they could have a year earlier, Khan refuses the framing that the numbers must simply collapse. The problem is narrower: families anchor on one country.

America is attractive because it gives generous need-based aid to undergraduates — the UK, Canada, and Australia are, in her words, “financially stingy” at that level. But only around a hundred American universities offer need-based aid to international students, and competition for them is brutal. Even an 80% scholarship can be undone by currency depreciation.

Her counsel is to keep a global approach and treat it like an economist. Work out your BATNA. If your best realistic Pakistani option is NUST — ranked around 280 globally — then the goal is to land somewhere ranked higher than NUST while paying less than LUMS. Run the QS and Times Higher Education lists and the options surface: at least six Hong Kong universities in the global top 150, several giving full scholarships, some accessible through government-to-government arrangements like the Belt and Road scholarship that adds a stipend on top of tuition. The same exists in Turkey, Malaysia, and Korea.

The block, she says, is the Pakistani parent. She offers Bocconi — ranked sixteenth in the world for economics, with 100% merit scholarships — and the answer comes back: “We haven’t even heard of Bocconi.” Families stay stuck on a tiny percentile of opportunities because those are the only names they recognise.

Loans, negotiation, and the cheaper degree

Muzamil presses on student loans. Pakistanis carry an aversion to them; Indians don’t, and you see far more of them at top American universities as a result. He’s careful to add the structured version of the argument: in STEM, where outcomes are more predictable, a loan against a known salary band is not reckless.

Khan agrees, then complicates it. The first problem isn’t appetite, it’s access — Pakistani banks have never built the dollarised student-loan market Indian banks did, and she puts that question back on the bankers. But the deeper objection she hears, and respects, is religious: families don’t want interest-bearing loans. So she routes around it entirely.

Before any loan, she says, negotiate. Students treat an offer letter as fixed in stone and are terrified that asking for more will get the admission revoked. It won’t. Universities care about their yield rate — having admitted you, it’s in their interest that you enrol — which puts the student in a position of quiet power. She played offers against each other for her own daughter this year. More striking, she describes a student with “D’s and E’s literally” whose personal statement was compelling enough to draw offers from three colleges; he took a $50,000 scholarship from one and bid it up against the next. After that, look at on-campus work-study, another thing Pakistani students hesitate over and Indian students don’t.

And if the loan question is really about cost, target where tuition is a tenth of America’s. Stockholm School of Economics is ranked fortieth in the world for economics at roughly €10,000 a year before any scholarship. The University of Malaya sits in the global top 100 for most subjects at $6,000. Turkish public universities run $2,000 to $3,000, less if you’re willing to spend a year learning the language. German public universities are effectively free, with only a living-cost requirement — Germany now asks accepted students for a blocked bank account proving they can cover expenses, a guard added because some Pakistanis abused the system. The recurring point: an FSc student who assumes they’re locked out can sometimes access a world-class degree for less than LUMS fees. “It’s an effort game,” Muzamil sums up. The doors are open; people have closed them in their own heads.

A system that is flawed, not just inefficient

About a third of the way in, Muzamil widens the frame. Everything so far concerns the top 3% — the O/A level students, a sliver of the country. He asks Khan to draw on her development background and talk about the public system most children actually pass through.

His worry, sharpened, is that the education system isn’t merely inefficient — it’s flawed. “It is not designed to create the humans of the future,” he says, the ones who’ll live in a world being remade by AI, where redundant work is automated and what’s left demands problem-solving and critical thinking.

Khan agrees, and extends the diagnosis upward. Even the O/A level track has descended into rote learning — every second student now has straight A’s, a “past paper hack,” the system putting a premium on grades over learning. The most damning statistic she offers comes from the HEC itself: 4,000 PhDs who graduated in a single year and are unemployed. The very top of the food chain, made redundant because the education they received doesn’t match what industry needs. Students come to her with M.Phils unable to write a basic PhD proposal.

The vocational layer is no better. Khan has visited at least thirty TEVTAs and PVTCs across Punjab. The buildings are huge; the teachers are the same ones from thirty or forty years ago, teaching the same curriculum. At a technical institute in Lahore she describes a printing machine donated in the seventies, bigger than the room, closed off and unused — students learning the machinery “theoretically from the book.” Her conclusion is that skills-based education is exactly what Pakistan’s numbers demand, and exactly what the public sector keeps failing to deliver, so it belongs in private hands.

The grim macro read

Muzamil takes the conversation to the country itself, and frames it honestly: the top 3% sit in their drawing rooms imagining a Pakistan they’ve seen abroad, often with little grasp of what the other 97% actually live. He reaches for TikTok as his example — dismissed early as cringe, when in fact it was the first time that crowd was seeing the country’s real cultural mainstream, the data finally visible.

Asked for an honest read on whether the can is about to be kicked down the road again, Khan doesn’t soften it. She doesn’t think Pakistan will implode — the world can’t afford to let it, given its geostrategic importance. But she doesn’t see the country sitting down to fix things either. She sees business as usual on a downward graph, and reaches for a comparison that lands hard: rather than becoming an East Asian tiger, Pakistan looks more like a developing African nation. Muzamil pushes — that’s the opposite end of the spectrum — and she holds the line, pointing to the social indicators. Bangladesh started at the same spot and pulled ahead on growth, infant and maternal mortality, education. “We have gotten left behind,” she says, and a society this polarised has no space left for the conversation that would change it.

Three children, three philosophies

The mood lifts when Muzamil, a father of a two-year-old, asks about early childhood. Khan has effectively run an experiment on her own three children and reports the results without varnish.

Her middle child did Montessori — the real version, mixed-age classes where older learners mentor younger ones, which she contrasts with Pakistan’s age-segregated imitation. When he moved back, he was placed a grade ahead. Her eldest, “the biggest experiment,” got everything: she’s a particular fan of the Japanese Kumon method, which drills one concept by repetition until it’s mastered before moving on. Her youngest went into the Waldorf system in Virginia — learning through play, no writing until around fourth grade, no devices, nature-toned classrooms, toys without features so the child supplies the imagination, children churning their own butter and baking their own bread for lunch. Parents sit in the room knitting; Khan was told to put her laptop away. She left after a year — not because it failed, but because minus-ten-degree outdoor play in all weather was more than she could sustain.

The research, she notes, vindicates the unfamiliar models: Waldorf graduates, the ones who didn’t write until grade four, outperform Montessori and mainstream graduates at college level. Since most of these systems aren’t available in Pakistan, she points families toward the IB — its primary-years programme is closest in philosophy, meant to run without assessments until parental pressure reintroduces them. Homeschooling, she adds, works well too, as long as the child gets social activity through sports or performing arts.

A live counselling session built on a 2.3 GPA

To close, Muzamil runs a mock session, casting himself as the client: a FAST computer-science graduate wanting a master’s, open to anywhere. Khan starts with academics, and corrects the common belief that work experience offsets a weak transcript — it doesn’t, and many countries cut you before reading the rest. Muzamil offers his real number: a 2.3 GPA.

Khan turns it into a decision tree. Willing to sit the GRE? Then America is open. Not willing? Then the rest of the world is. A strong GRE can offset some of the damage from a low GPA, but only some — the GPA travels with you. With a 2.3, she says plainly, there’s no point applying to Canada; it would automate you out before a human reads your statement. The UK works the same way under its honours bands. The US is the one country that reads holistically, which is where the personal statement and interview carry the narrative — she invokes the D’s-and-F’s student again, who packaged himself into a top liberal arts college and a generous scholarship. “Think of it almost like a marketing endeavour,” she says. “You are marketing yourself.”

When Muzamil adds the constraint of a wife and child and a one-year programme, Khan reframes the geography. The cutting edge of technology and engineering is the Far East — Singapore, South Korea — places most Pakistani students never consider. For media, she’d look to the Netherlands and Scandinavia, where public universities are free and graduate programmes are increasingly taught in English precisely to draw the world in, while Pakistan debates moving everything to Urdu.

Asked the show’s closing question — Pakistan in 2050, with the hopeful caveats explicitly banned — Khan won’t manufacture optimism. She sees the country roughly where it is today, stagnant, held there by a social and political culture with no group able to break the deadlock. Muzamil lets the grimness stand and turns it into the episode’s quiet argument: the first step toward reform is admitting reform is needed. The honesty, in his reading, is the useful part.