Why Pakistan needs an inclusive university, not another elite one

A second federally chartered university, and why the partnership is the point

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as a continuation of a longer thread he has been pulling on the show — the future of Pakistan’s services-export economy, and the simple fact that those exports cannot scale without a much larger pool of educated graduates feeding into them. The previous episode had been with the chairman of the Higher Education Commission. This one sits next to it: a private-sector view of the same problem, from a co-founder building a new institution in real time.

Jahanzeb Burana is introduced as the co-founder and vice president of the National Institute of Technology. NIT is the second federally chartered private university in Pakistan, and the first to be set up in partnership with Arizona State University. Burana, by his own description, is “not from the education sector,” and he frames that as an asset. He trained as an investment banker, finished an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2010, worked in private equity across Asia and parts of Africa, and spent time in Pakistan’s public sector before turning to education with his co-founder Shazeb roughly five years ago.

The framing he sets up early is precise. “If there is a way to really redefine a society or uplift a society,” he tells Muzamil, “education is the way to do that.” NIT did not start from an idle napkin sketch. Burana and his co-founder had already worked in K-twelve and run an ed-tech venture aimed at democratising English-language access. The conclusion they kept arriving at was structural: innovating at the K-twelve level does not move the needle when there is nowhere for those students to go afterwards. The destination has to be fixed first.

The numbers Muzamil keeps repeating

Muzamil returns to a statistic he has cited on the show before, and he encourages listeners to verify it themselves through the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. Roughly fifty lakh Pakistanis turn eighteen each year. Of those, around twenty-five lakh never go to school. Of the twenty-five lakh who graduate high school, the total number of higher-education seats available is around five lakh.

That ratio reframes the entire public conversation about whether degrees are worth getting. “We have a discourse in Pakistan,” Muzamil says, “about whether university degrees are better or skills are better — when in fact most kids don’t even have the opportunity to get a university education in the first place.” The HEC chairman, he notes, claims the enrolment ratio has been pushed up to around thirteen percent. Burana adds the context: that is still one of the lowest in the region.

This is where Burana makes the first of several arguments that will recur. Private-sector universities began appearing in Pakistan in earnest around 2012 and 2013, and the “mushroom growth” that followed was, in itself, evidence of demand the public sector could not meet. The early wave of private universities competed on superficial proxies for quality — carpeted classrooms, air conditioning, large screens — but the underlying market signal was real.

Why copying Harvard in Karachi is a category error

Muzamil presses on the cynicism that hangs over private higher education in Pakistan: the suspicion that anyone running a university is running a business, and that anyone running a business in education is, by definition, cutting corners.

Burana’s response is one of the sharper passages of the conversation. The model that critics implicitly hold up — the Harvard or Oxford-style elite research university — is, in his reading, the wrong model to chase in an emerging market. Those institutions sit on enormous endowments. Those endowments subsidise local students, fund research, and free faculty to publish in journals like Econometrica. None of that financial base exists in Pakistan. “Because we set the wrong goal and the wrong ambition without understanding that a higher institution of the kind that we look up to needs a certain resource base,” he says, “we end up failing — and then we say, look, our professors’ research just sits in our cupboards.”

What an emerging market actually needs, he argues, is great teaching institutions at scale. Research can be focused, targeted, and tied to public-policy priorities — engineering, renewable energy, cotton — but the mass-market function of higher education is to teach well, place graduates into careers, and do that at a price point that can be sustained without an endowment.

Which brings him to financial sustainability. “Financial sustainability is not a crime,” he says. “The crime is that after financial sustainability, you didn’t deliver quality.” The real grievance behind the cynicism, in his reading, is not that universities make money — it is that they make money without producing graduates who can do anything with the degree.

The fast graduate’s quiet observation about salaries

Muzamil interjects with a personal note that lands well. He graduated from FAST in 2015. FAST ran on an endowment model — a principal endowment from BCCI in the 1980s that compounded over decades, allowing the institution to keep fees low and quality high. He has stayed in touch with his professors. What he has watched in the last four to five years is a salary problem he describes very directly. The same instructor who is producing the strongest students in a graduating batch — the kind of instructor who is single-handedly responsible for the talent that emerges from the cohort — is now being offered remote AIML jobs at ten, twelve, fifteen thousand dollars a month. A non-profit university paying three to five lakh rupees cannot hold that person against the private market.

The implication is precisely Burana’s point in reverse. A university that wants to deliver quality has to be able to pay for the people who deliver it. A university that is structurally underpriced will lose the people who matter, and the quality argument collapses from the inside.

The lion, the mouse, and the ASU partnership

The mechanics of the ASU partnership are where the conversation gets most concrete, and it is here that Burana tells the analogy that does most of the work in the episode.

NIT, he is careful to point out, is not a tuition centre. It is a federally chartered university in its own right — ASU does not partner with non-chartered institutions. What “powered by ASU” means is that ASU holds equity in NIT. They sit on the management committee. They are part of the operating governance. They are part of quality assurance. They are involved in the appointment of key local positions.

To explain why this structure matters, Burana reaches for the old fable of the lion caught in a net asking the mouse for help. The mouse hesitates: once the lion is free, the lion’s incentives will change, and the mouse will be eaten. The lion’s answer is to take out his teeth and hand them to the mouse. “When you bring a global operating partner like ASU into your governance structure,” Burana says, “it is like taking out your teeth and giving them away. Even if someone wanted to dilute on quality later, they would not be able to.”

That signalling is the substance of the partnership. ASU is one of the largest public-sector universities in the United States, has been ranked number one for innovation in the US — ahead of Harvard and MIT — was the first university to partner formally with OpenAI, and recently launched a global K-twelve school with Sal Khan. They run roughly thirty universities around the world through their global platform Cintana, including the Galala University in Egypt and a forthcoming American University of Riyadh. “This is not ASU’s first rodeo,” Burana says.

Three plus one, four plus one, and what the student actually walks away with

Muzamil asks the practical question. What does the partnership mean for a student sitting in a classroom in Pakistan?

The answer is unusually crisp. NIT’s undergraduate students can do three years at NIT and transfer to ASU for their fourth year, graduating with an ASU degree. They can also do four years at NIT and a one-year master’s at ASU. For students who meet a defined academic performance criterion, the transfer to ASU is guaranteed. The visa, Burana is careful to note, is not — that is a separate government question — but a guaranteed admission to a major US public university clearly improves the odds.

Crucially, a student who completes the fourth year at ASU graduates as an ASU graduate, not an NIT graduate. They become indistinguishable from any other ASU alumnus in the US job market. They sit on the same OPT clock, compete for the same H-1B sponsorships, and tap into the same alumni network. This is a meaningfully different shape than the British TNE-style programmes that have existed in Pakistan, where a student gets a foreign degree without ever becoming part of the issuing university’s actual graduating class. The Cintana network — Egypt, Turkey, Spain, soon Saudi Arabia — extends the connections further.

For curriculum, ASU’s content is now in NIT’s hands, with the right to translate it into Urdu. Faculty members retain the flexibility to teach their courses their way, but the skeleton of what is taught — the learning outcomes, the credit-hour structure — has to meet ASU’s standards, because that is what makes the transfer of credits possible. The triangulation between ASU’s standards, HEC’s requirements, and Pakistan’s local market is where Cintana’s experience across emerging markets becomes useful.

The fifth industrial revolution, and the mindset question

About two-thirds of the way through, Muzamil zooms out to the question he most wants to ask. The global economy is in the early stages of what he calls the fifth industrial revolution. The education systems most countries inherited were designed for the fourth — moving an agricultural workforce into factories, and training people to repeat a small set of tasks reliably. Pakistan, in his reading, has inherited that DNA and is still building a workforce optimised for redundant labour, just as automation is making redundant labour the first category of work to disappear.

What replaces it, he argues, is interdisciplinary thinking, judgement, and creativity. He cites his own experience at FAST — a hardcore engineering school where he was, in his words, “the artist type,” and where an entire field like UI/UX could have opened up if the institution had been able to take design seriously. The structural problem he names is that Pakistan’s undergraduate system locks students into a fixed track from day one, with little room to discover what they actually want to do.

Burana’s response is the heart of the episode. He agrees with the diagnosis and then reframes the prescription. Universities globally, he says, have enormous inertia. He has seen it at top-tier K-twelve schools in New York, where introducing entrepreneurship or critical thinking into the curriculum is treated as harder than introducing a piano lesson. The opening of this moment is real, but it has to be used.

He breaks what a graduating student needs into two parts: content and mindset. Content is the easier part. The harder part — and the one that has been treated as a “nice-to-have” — is mindset. “I will always be in a mode of learning and unlearning,” is how he frames the mindset he wants NIT graduates to leave with. “I am on a continuous mission to disrupt myself.” His framing is that anything that can be measured will be automated; the durable human work will be where judgement and subjectivity matter. The mindset he wants to instil is the only thing that travels across an uncertain four-year window.

He tells a story from a US longitudinal study to make the point. Two groups of students received standard feedback on an English test. One group received one extra line — “I believe in you. I think you can do better.” Years later, the group that had received that single sentence performed measurably better in academics. The capacity did not change. The mindset did. That, he argues, is what an education institution can deliberately design for, and what most of them refuse to.

Range, T-shaped people, and why a Harvard MBA didn’t want to be a general manager

Muzamil pushes Burana on the interdisciplinary point. The university is called the National Institute of Technology, and its initial degree offerings are heavy on computer science, AI, cyber security, and data science. How does an institution with that surface area produce graduates with range, rather than narrow technologists?

Burana’s answer pulls a specific thread. The American liberal-arts model, he points out, is built around a wider pyramid in the first two years. An NIT engineering student will not spend their first two years immersed only in engineering — they will take maths, social sciences, and humanities before narrowing. The British model, by contrast, narrows at A-level. Range, in his view, has been “massively underappreciated” in Pakistan, and it is becoming the asset.

He uses the language of T-shaped talent — someone with a broad range across the top and deep expertise in one domain — and notes that the most interesting new companies are organising themselves around that shape. Steve Jobs’s font-design class at Reed is the example everyone cites; the underlying principle is more general. Drawing from a wide set of experiences to inform a specific problem is the human skill that does not get automated.

Muzamil ties this back to a piece of writing he has carried with him: the cartoonist behind Dilbert describing how he stopped trying to be the best at any one thing and instead combined modest skills — an office job, an interest in doodling, a sense of humour — into a niche almost no one else was competing in. “The bar was low because nobody else was doing it,” is how he summarises it. The argument is that range protects you precisely because it removes you from the line everyone else is queuing in. “Now in the AI world,” he adds, “that line is crumbling anyway.”

Burana’s own example is sharper. Doug Becker, the founder of Cintana — and previously of Laureate, once the largest higher-education company in the world, owning some seventy universities — did not come from academia. “For somebody who’s not from academia to set up the largest higher-education company in the world,” he says, “can only happen when someone with a range comes in from a fresh perspective.”

The work-ethic problem nobody wants to name

Muzamil presses on the part of the services-export story that does not show up in talent-brochure decks. He has spoken to exporters and IT-services buyers, in Pakistan and abroad, and the feedback he keeps hearing is not that Pakistani technical skill is lacking — it is competitive. The gap is work ethic. Discipline. Communication. Globalised thinking. The judgement of how to show up in a corporate context.

His structural reading is that Pakistan’s last twenty years of uplift has been heavily concentrated in Punjab, which is roughly half the population. The result is that when the world meets “a Pakistani worker” at scale, it is increasingly meeting a worker from Punjab’s mass market — often a first-generation university student, often a first-generation corporate worker. That worker has skill but lacks the silent infrastructure of how-things-are-done that an elite-cream graduate from a top-tier university used to bring pre-built.

Burana agrees and reframes this as the exact failure mode of the higher-education sector. The student arriving from a third-tier city, living in a hostel for the first time, going through a metropolis for the first time — that student is going through a structured cultural training whether the university designs it or not. The job of the university is to take ownership of that. He proposes a concrete KPI: job-placement ratio of alumni. If that becomes the single source of truth, every other design decision — soft skills, communication, work ethic, time management — can be reverse-engineered from it.

He balances this with a second observation. The definition of “productive” is also shifting. The world his parents grew up in had workers staying at a single company for thirty-five or forty years; the world today has people switching jobs every four to five. When he was at HBS, HBS produced general managers. By 2010, very few of his classmates wanted to be general managers. The single-track corporate career path that work ethic used to be measured against is itself dissolving. Both sides will have to evolve — graduates and the institutions that employ them.

Pakistan in 2050, told through a road and a tubewell

Muzamil closes with the question he asks most guests. Burana spent years at Harvard, years working outside Pakistan, and chose to come back and invest in this. What does he think Pakistan looks like in twenty-five years?

His answer is grounded rather than abstract. He grew up in southern Punjab. As a child, driving from Lahore to his village took six, seven, eight hours on the GT Road, bumpy enough that watches would fall off wrists. The same drive today takes three and a half hours, the bulk of it on the motorway. As a child, electricity in his village came on for two hours a day; a generator would be pulled to life by a rope to get through the rest. Today the village is solarised, with 3G and 4G, and WhatsApp calls run from there to the rest of the world.

“Do you discount all of that and say, well, it just happened by accident, but otherwise we’ve gone in the wrong direction?” he asks. “That’s not it.” His thesis is that Pakistan has been on a slow upward path — in infrastructure, in digital payments, in the rural-urban migration that has emptied agricultural labour into cities and into services. Not every country has done even that. At a certain inflection point, momentum compounds. The talent base, he allows, is closer to raw material than finished product — “raw material is plentiful; talent has to be carved out” — but the raw material is there.

By the end of the conversation, Burana’s frame for 2050 is not a number. It is a delta. “There is going to be a delta,” he says. “And it is going to be a statistically significant delta. We are going to be better.” When Muzamil asks whether the rate of change accelerates after that point, the answer is yes — momentum compounds, ecosystems start to speak to each other, and the pieces of a wider jigsaw start fitting in. The shark-tank-Urdu version of Pakistan’s entrepreneurial culture, he notes almost as an aside, is a small but real example of an ecosystem maturing in plain sight.

Muzamil closes the conversation at the one-hour-thirty-minute mark with the framing that lands the episode. “I think a lot of the rails are being built right now,” he says, “and once those rails are built, the trains will be faster.” NIT’s first batch will graduate in four years. That is when the philosophy gets tested against the outcomes.