Pakistan's universities are producing toilet paper degrees

Born in a garrison, shaped by the fall of Dhaka

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Zia Khan where his story begins. The answer is Sialkot — specifically an army garrison — before the family moved to Karachi in 1970. But Zia Khan marks his real starting point as December 1971, the month Dhaka fell.

“I was very well connected even when I was 11 to the whole political scene,” he says. “When the fall of Dhaka happened, it forced me to think — we have to find out what is wrong with us. It was a wake-up call.” He pauses, then adds dryly: “Though for others it became a sleeping call. Denial.”

The young Zia wanted to be a general. He was not a strong student — his intermediate score was 53.2 percent, a number he recites with deliberate precision (“I tell everyone the point-two so no one overtakes me at 53”). Rejected from most institutions, he ended up at the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants, where, he says, he learned for the first time what it actually meant to study on his own. That lesson — that no teacher can substitute for a student who reads independently — became the philosophical spine of everything he built later.

Five degrees in Arizona and a deliberate return

In 1987, Zia Khan left for Arizona State University. By December 1992 he had completed five concurrent programs: an MBA, an MS in engineering, a master of accountancy, a CPA, and a CMA. The logic was explicit. “Economics, business management, and technology — we have to connect these three dots together,” he explains. “Any educated person will tell you the same thing.”

He had three cities to choose from after graduating: Silicon Valley for technology, New York for finance, Chicago for the options market. He chose Silicon Valley, not because it was his strength — technology was his weakest area — but because he had concluded that “without technology, there will be no base for economics, no base for finance. The base will be technology.”

He registered a company called Genesis, sponsored his own H1 visa, and spent six years building experience in hardware and then software. When Java appeared, he recognised it immediately. “I made some calls, some bets, and some of them paid off,” he says. “When Java came on the scene I realised this is going to be big. I closed everything else and focused on it.” He chose not to apply for a green card. The reasoning was straightforward: “You can’t spend all day criticising America and then take financial benefit from it. It’s not an honourable thing to do.”

By 1999 he was back in Karachi.

Operation Badr: teaching Java in borrowed offices

Zia Khan returned to Pakistan with no institution behind him and no fixed premises. He named his effort Operation Badr — a reference to the Prophet’s instruction after the Battle of Badr that prisoners who taught ten Muslims to read would earn their freedom. “He knew the importance of education,” Zia Khan says simply.

He taught Java — both server-side and client-side — in the CDMs of other people’s offices, then in university auditoriums on weekends, affiliating with IBA, Usman Institute of Technology, and other Karachi institutions under their brand while keeping his own. By the time of the first IT expo in 2001, he had more than 100,000 students across Pakistan, with a train-the-trainer model that had spread to Quetta, Lahore, and Peshawar.

Then came September 11.

Nine-eleven and the decade in the wilderness

Muzamil presses Zia Khan on a gap in the timeline: what happened between 2001 and roughly 2010? The answer is stark. “On the day of nine-eleven we were at 100,000 students. After nine-eleven, how many do you think we dropped to? You will not be able to guess. Five.”

The mechanism was psychological, not economic. Pakistani students had been learning Java primarily as a visa strategy — there were memes, Zia Khan recalls, of Java developers boarding trains to America, and then the same developers returning on trains after the attacks. “As soon as nine-eleven happened, students thought: no green card, no visa. So they stopped studying.” He is unsparing about what this revealed: “We are very short-sighted people. We look for the shortcut that works in two days.”

The collapse was also personal. Zia Khan had been teaching classes of 800 or more. Dropping to five students was emotionally disintegrating. He kept a small team going — his cousin and business partner Hira, a colleague named Rehan, two or three others — teaching free at Saylani Welfare Trust on weekends and charging a thousand rupees elsewhere, splitting revenue fifty-fifty with partner universities. The model survived because it had no fixed costs. “I can go from one student to a million students at the same cost,” he says. “I have no fixed cost.”

The sector only began recovering around 2010 to 2011, when freelancing platforms emerged and the terrorism-era stigma on Pakistani developers began to lift.

HEC: a mafia of incompetent PhDs

By the time Muzamil asks about the quality of university education, Zia Khan has been building to this argument for most of the conversation. His diagnosis is precise and unambiguous.

“Analyze it and the biggest problem I see is HEC,” he says. The Higher Education Commission mandated that only PhD holders could teach, which had two cascading effects. First, it flooded universities with academics who had never worked in industry. Second, it locked out practitioners — the people who actually knew how to code — because they had no time to complete a master’s degree while working.

“The person sitting in industry doing the work couldn’t go back and do a master’s. So they couldn’t teach. And the bachelor’s graduate who couldn’t find a job enrolled in a master’s, then started teaching — without knowing anything themselves.”

The result, he argues, is a self-reinforcing system. “HEC has become a mafia of incompetent PhDs. A mafia of useless PhDs that places its own people in universities everywhere.” He notes that university owners will never say this on the record, but “if you talk to them off the record, the biggest hurdle to quality education in Pakistan is HEC.”

Private universities compound the problem differently: revenue pressure forces them to admit everyone and pass everyone. “Your degrees — 99 percent of them — are not better than toilet paper. They don’t mean anything.” Public universities have a different failure: underpaid teachers with no motivation, and in Karachi’s case, a period when political violence meant that failing a student could be physically dangerous.

The PIAIC model: large auditoriums, automated exams, and earned income

The Presidential Initiative for Artificial Intelligence and Computing — PIAIC — is Zia Khan’s attempt to build the system he believes Pakistan needs. Muzamil asks him to explain how it actually works.

The funding model is deliberately lean. The government provided no money. Fees were set at one thousand rupees per month — low enough that most people could afford it — and collected through Saylani Welfare Trust to establish credibility. “When everyone else is selling snake oil, it’s fair that people are suspicious of me too,” Zia Khan says.

The teaching model is built around large auditoriums — 800 to 850 students at a time — at partner institutions including AIR University in Islamabad and CECOS in Peshawar. Zia Khan travels a circuit: Karachi on Tuesday and Wednesday, Islamabad on Friday, Peshawar by road on Saturday, Lahore on Sunday. Exams are automated and centralised, taken out of individual teachers’ hands. “Semester system in Pakistan has totally failed because the teacher controls the grade,” he says. The solution is MCQ-based automated testing, which also allows him to manage thousands of students simultaneously.

The syllabus has evolved. The original four tracks — blockchain, AI, internet of things, and cloud-native computing — have been replaced by a programme centred on TypeScript and Next.js for web development, with specialisations in web3, metaverse, blockchain, IoT, and generative AI. The rationale is practical: teach the latest state-of-the-art technology, but anchor it in skills that have immediate job market demand.

The newest addition is what Zia Khan calls “earn as you learn.” In the third quarter of the programme, students build sellable products — templates on Theme Forest using Jam Stack, API development — so that income generation is integrated into the curriculum rather than deferred to after graduation. “If a student starts making even five dollars a day, what’s wrong with that?” he says. “Make them a small entrepreneur.”

The dropout problem and the women problem

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks Zia Khan to be honest about PIAIC’s weaknesses. He is. “The biggest weakness of my system — and I am responsible for it, I’m not blaming anyone else — is dropouts.”

Roughly 50 percent of students leave after the first quarter, as soon as the first exam arrives. Of the 40,000 who attended the Karachi cricket stadium test event — a spectacle designed partly to generate hype and awareness — PIAIC admits around 8,000 to 10,000 and graduates between 10 and 20 percent of those after four quarters. As of the recording, approximately 10,000 people have either graduated or are in their final quarter.

The second acknowledged weakness is the near-total absence of women. “I have never gone above 10 percent women in my student body, despite every kind of social marketing I have tried.” He describes it as one of the reasons he came on the podcast — to reach women who might not know the programme exists. A team member, Hira Khan, has been assigned full-time to address this gap.

The motivation problem underlying dropouts is why Zia Khan resists fully online delivery despite its obvious cost advantages. “The Pakistani student’s biggest problem is motivation,” he says. “I need to look them in the eye, with love, with a little scolding — why didn’t you do your homework? Without this, they can’t do it.” COVID forced a fully online model; dropout rates worsened. The current hybrid — four hours face-to-face per week, supplemented by Zoom sessions and pre-recorded studio content — is the closest approximation to what works.

Government initiatives, political will, and the limits of committees

Muzamil raises the question of why government-backed digital initiatives have repeatedly failed. Zia Khan’s answer is structural. “Management by committee — nothing gets done that way. You have to select a person.”

He is careful to distinguish intention from execution. The Jawan Pakistan initiative under Usman Dar had good intentions — “I have met him, very nice guy, his niyyat looked quite okay to me” — but no technical experience. Tania Aidrus, brought in for Digital Pakistan, understood international IT in general terms but was not a developer, and was eventually destroyed by political infighting. “The person who leads this has to be politically resilient — like a mule, never falls, keeps going — and at the same time highly technical. A technical leader.”

PIAIC itself receives no government funding. Zia Khan has offered his syllabus, his exam systems, and his time free of charge to multiple government programmes. “I don’t get a single paisa from PIAIC,” he says. The syllabi are published openly at panaverse.co. The obstacle is not resources but will — and the absence of people who combine technical depth with the political durability to survive Pakistan’s institutional environment.

2050: education or dissolution

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks the question he puts to all guests: what does Pakistan look like in 2050?

Zia Khan does not soften the answer. “If we don’t learn our lesson and don’t pay attention to education, Pakistan will be no more. No matter how much I love Pakistan. A country cannot survive by earning ten rupees, spending five hundred on debt, and spending even those ten rupees on luxury.” He points to recent budgets: no meaningful expense cuts visible to him.

The alternative he describes is not optimistic so much as conditional. IT skills are portable. Whether a student stays or leaves, software development is the one field where global employment exists. “If you’re going to run anyway, at least learn to swim first. IT skills work anywhere — Australia, America, Europe, anywhere.” The goal of PIAIC, in his framing, is not to keep people in Pakistan but to ensure that wherever they end up, they have something real to offer.

“We are not rats,” he says. “We should fight it out. Either we will be martyred or we will succeed.” He acknowledges, without much comfort, that most of his students no longer believe the second option is available to them.