LAHORE, Jan 24: The Punjab government has decided not to award a university status to any more college in the province. Officials of the education department told Dawn on Tuesday that the decision had been taken by the government because most of the colleges upgraded as varsities could not come up to the expectations.

Following the decision, the Kinnaird College’s dream of becoming a university may not materialize. The KC principal had formally requested Punjab Education Minister Imran Masood to award it a university status.

The Government College Lahore, the Lahore College for Women, the Government College Sargodha and the Government College Faisalabad were given the status of varsities a couple of years ago.

The officials said: “The experiment could not work as the government wanted them (upgraded colleges) to establish themselves as seats of learning with improved quality of education and research.”

“By awarding them a varsity status we have lost good colleges. Most of them even could not become good universities either,” they added.

Some varsity teachers told this reporter that the government had taken the decision of upgrading colleges as varsities without doing proper homework. The decision, they said, should also have been debated in the assembly.

“To develop a successful varsity, brainstorming, shared vision of educationists and technocrats, documentation, infrastructure and faculty development are required,” they explained.

“The varsity management is not an easy task. It needs to develop strong academic and general administration, besides financial order before upgrading a college as a varsity,” they added.

The academics believed that the main focus of some of the upgraded colleges was to cater to the needs of undergraduate students, as they were least concerned in capacity building for postgraduate programmes. “To emerge as better universities they should dispense with the intermediate courses and introduce different postgraduate programmes to compete with other public and private universities,” they suggested.

Some of these universities are also opening their sub-campuses in the districts as well. The teachers suggested that the government should not allow them to open sub-campuses as it required new faculty having a strong link with the main campus.