ISLAMABAD, Sept 1: Higher Education Commission (HEC) Chairman Dr Attaur Rehman said Pakistan was facing a great challenge in the higher education sector and the time had come to put the house in order to take the country forward.

He was addressing a gathering of parliamentarians, nazims and bureaucrats at the National Defence College (NDC) here on Friday.

Quoting a world bank report, he said Pakistan was at least 35-40 years behind East Asian countries and 10-15 years behind the South Asian countries in education.

With an increase in the higher education budget during the last four years, the future represented an age of opportunity for country’s youth, he added.

“At present a mere 3.7 per cent of the youth have access to higher education, but the HEC was endeavouring to double the figure over the next five years, without compromising on quality as there could be nothing worse than poor quality graduates,” he said.

The challenge is to unleash the potential of youth and invest in knowledge in order to become a developed country, he said, adding that knowledge had now become the main driving force of world economies.

To address the issue of quality faculty, maximum emphasis is now being placed on training of brightest students at PhD level in top universities abroad. The previous low quality of teaching and research lacking relevance to the national needs is being addressed in the new programmes, he said.

He also outlined HEC’s action plan for faculty development which included scholarships for doctoral programmes. The latest scholarship project to be approved was for Rs15 billion that would benefit students of the country.

He said arrangements had also been made to facilitate free access to academic literature, sophisticated instrumentation and technically assisted learning. The HEC is also supporting academia-industry linkages.

Dr Rehman also mentioned the remarkable change in salary structure for university teachers under the Tenure Track System, which had so far been adopted by 35 universities.

He said the successful Foreign Faculty Hiring Programme launched to reverse brain drain had attracted 270 eminent professors from abroad.