KARACHI: In the next five years, Pakistan's education system will produce between 1,200 and 1,500 PhDs every year. The scheme will cost Rs six billion with 1,000 PhD applicants being given scholarships this year , minister in-charge of the ministry of science and technology and chairman of the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Dr Attaur Rahman, says in a Dawn Dialogue interview.
He said four public sector universities had adopted the tenure track system and others would follow. He clarified that universities were free to choose this system of tenure for their faculty, and those which did would get adequate funding from the HEC.
He said that a "disparity" in the hiring of foreign faculty members had been corrected by allowing the same pay scales to local faculty members who come back from abroad after completing further studies. Dr Rahman said that he was "delighted" that Pakistan was perhaps the only country in the world where a professor's salary could be three to four times more than that of a federal minister.
He said that libraries were in a "total mess" and in fact could not even be called 'libraries'. To set that right, a nationwide digital library will be launched soon.
Also, 55 universities have been connected nationwide through fibre optics and a lecture given at any one can be seen and enjoyed, through video-conferencing, by any student of the member institutions.
The following is the edited text of the Dawn Dialogue interview with Dr Attaur Rahman.
DR ATTAUR RAHMAN: The Higher Education Commission came into being about one and a half years ago. Previously the University Grants Commission was acting as a post office and it had no real vision and no action plan. The education ministry has a vast canvas with school education and literacy and so many things on its plate. It was essential to have a focused programme dedicated to higher education. And so the Higher Education Commission was formed, just like the Atomic Energy Commission, as a totally autonomous body not working under any ministry.
It reports directly to the prime minister and the chairman of the HEC has been given the status of a federal minister. The executive director of the HEC has the status of a secretary to the government. And it has been given the freedom to approve all of its projects, like any other ministry, up to Rs 40 million. And beyond that, the projects are referred to the CDWP and Ecnec. It has a board of eminent educationists derived from the private sector, from the government and from the end-users.
When I took over I looked at what was going on and I was appalled to see that 75 per cent of the faculty members should not be there in the universities in the first place. That is the first rung in the ladder and having a PhD is a must. My first goal is - and has been - to improve faculty quality. How do we elevate the quality of faculties which is important if we want to improve the standard of education? We must bring in a system which is performance driven. There are several different pillars of the education system, and I am talking about pillar one, which is the faculty.
We have launched three major nationwide projects. One is to cultivate research within the universities and to create an atmosphere of research. We have launched a major indigenous PhD production programme. Pakistan after 50 years is at a point where we only produce 200 PhDs per year. India produces 5,000. We have started a new programme, which has been approved, which is for about Rs.6 billion, which is approved by Ecnec.
We are going to produce 1,200 to 1,500 PhDs every year, five years from today. And this is in all subjects, not just in science. I am saying this because I am identified with science and technology, as I was the minister of science and technology. Nearly 18,000 students appeared in an interview for this PhD programme six months ago. A thousand will be given scholarships this year, and every year for the next five years we will give scholarships to 1,000 students.
We are not going to distribute money at random. We have identified about 800 supervisors in the country based on their track record and their names are given on the HEC website. And we are giving scholarships to students only under these PhD supervizors. They get a certain honorarium. They get a grant - I think it is Rs.8,000 a month - for student support. First they get a research grant which is about Rs 100,000 a year.
Only those universities are being provided this which have agreed to send their thesis abroad to technologically advanced countries for examination. And at least two examiners from technologically advanced countries must agree that the thesis is worth giving a doctorate to. So we have knit external examination to the system to ensure that there is quality.
QUESTION: Which are the universities which have opted to agree to this condition?
ANSWER: All the major universities have agreed to opt for this condition. We have selected the universities. We have selected the supervisors. These are scattered in different universities. This is part of the faculty development programme. We have done three things. This is one of them.
The second part of this programme is that we send a lot of people abroad for training. And under this programme we have looked at the statistics. Where is the lost race? We have found that of people who have worked in the US, at least half of them do not come back. I met personally the ministers of science and technology in Austria, Germany and other countries and many of these European countries have agreed to charge zero fees for PhD level training.
We have decided to send many people to the US and the UK and to European countries. And a large number of students will be going. A programme has been approved for Rs.3.5 billion under which we are just paying the living expenses of the students and we are placing them in top universities. China is one country where we have identified two universities. We have been very selective because even abroad there are weaker universities and we have selected only the best universities. Batches have already gone to Austria and China.
We plan to send 300 students every year for PhD level training. They are young faculty members, not confined to public sector universities because we have to strengthen the private sector universities as well. Final interviews are done by country representatives. It is a very transparent and open process.
The third part of the faculty development programme is attracting the best people who are settled abroad under a foreign faculty hiring programme and placing them in universities and research centres. Because here we get very valuable, cutting-edge technology experience from those who have lived for a number of years abroad. We have peer review committees which examine the qualification of the teachers settled abroad. They also decide the level - assistant, associate or full professor. They also determine the salary scale.
The salaries could be as much as Rs 225,000 a month at the upper level, starting from Rs 100,000 a month at the lower level. So these are good salaries. We place them in cities of their choice. However, only about 25 per cent of the people who are applying have been able to make it. We now have applications from 380 persons in the last four months. Of which we have placed 97 in different universities. Not all of them have joined. And they are in the process of coming in and joining. We are facilitating them.
In order to address the disparity in the salary structure between these people who are coming back and those who are working here at lower salaries, we have now started a system which is a tenure track system. It has been adopted by four universities already, the Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, the Engineering Universities, Lahore, and the UET, Taxila, and one more university. The others are in the process of adopting it.
This is a revolutionary measure. And I am delighted that we are the only country in the world where a professor can have a salary which is about three to four times that of a federal minister. The salary goes up to Rs 125,000 a month. However, we have not increased everybody's salaries. Because just giving more salaries to the same persons will not make any difference at all. There is a strong selection process in which their performance is reviewed.
Under the tenure track system they can get confirmed at a higher salary and if during the first three years they do not come up to the standards they are out. It is a contractual system. We have not invented it. It is on the pattern of the system which is in place in the West. This is what we have introduced in Pakistan and this is in the process of being systematically adopted in the universities.
Q: Are you applying this to all the faculties in the universities or are you giving them a choice?
A: There is an option for them. There is no compulsion. We have said that if you want to continue in the present system, this is fine. If you want a performance driven system, then you will have to cut your ropes from the previous system.
It has been very well received. Actually I have deliberately held it back because there were certain teachers who had reservations about the system. There is no compulsion, I have told the vice-chancellors of all the universities in the country. There is money built into the system. If you don't want to adopt it, fine, we will just divert the funds to the universities which want to adopt it.
Q: But some reservations were expressed by the teaching community about the introduction of foreign faculty employment programme?
A: There were some reservations about the disparity of salaries. But now we have corrected that disparity. Because we are also offering to the local faculty members the same pay scales as those who are coming back from abroad after spending a number of years there. So we have broken the barriers of grades. What I would like is that when a young boy or a girl is deciding what he or she wants to do in life, he or she should have some options open to him/her. At present the youth goes in to engineering, or medicine or business administration. End of story.
Nobody wants to go into theoretical physics or biotechnology or journalism or the social sciences because they do not see any light at the other end of the tunnel. But now they have an option in the teaching field. If they do good work, they can get a salary as high as in any other field, with the relevant securities also, once you are confirmed. Certain teachers had reservations about the new system, which we have clarified. I am very confident now this has been received very well.
The combination of these three factors should solve the major problem which afflicts our educational system - whether it is the primary education system or the secondary education system - it is not brick and mortar that you change. You have to have a system which has a better salary structure and this way you can hire better qualified people from abroad. The major problem of our educational system is that you do not have good teachers. Nobody wants to come into the teaching profession: a labourer earns more than a primary school teacher.
Let me now tell you about the other pillar of the system, which is infrastructure. We have taken a number of measures. Firstly, libraries. At the moment, the plight of libraries is beyond description. There are no journals, there are no books. Our libraries are in a total mess. You cannot call them libraries. What we have done is to launch a nationwide digital library - and this really excites me.
We have been working hard on this for the past one and a half years and now this has happened. And there are 31,600 journals which are available free of charge. Every single school or college or university - any educational institution under any ministry - will get free access. Of these, 11,600 journals are full text. Now each journal can cost thousands and thousands of dollars. And we are talking about 31,600 journals. Over 20,000 journals will be available in the form of abstracts. They will be available for all the disciplines. Again I want to get rid of the impression that I am associated with science and technology only.
This means that students sitting at home in Pakistan today can go onto the Internet and download the latest issues of all these journals. It is a huge nationwide library. This is something that no other country, not even the United States, has today. We are also holding training programmes to educate people how on how to use this system. We have to train the trainers. And now these trainers are training the universities. This is I think a fantastic thing that has happened. Technology has opened up a window which Pakistan is tapping. Even in the US and Europe, individual universities have such arrangements but there is no such nationwide access, which we have introduced in Pakistan.
Q: What is the total cost of the deal?
A: We got a very special nationwide deal. The total cost is $ 350,000 per year. Which is not much considering that there are so many journals available to all the universities. So this is one thing for infrastructure.
In each university we have set up a centralized equipment centre. We have connected 55 universities with fibre optics and this is part of the Pakistan Educational Research Network. If there is a lecture at LUMS, it can be heard at Khuzdar and any other university in the country. Under another major programme that we have started, these universities are putting up video conferences by the funding that we have provided.
And we expect that within the next two to three months, a series of lectures nationwide will start. It becomes irrelevant from where you have to deliver a lecture. The best people in different disciplines have been identified and they will deliver a lecture. It is a kind of virtual university except that it is interactive.
The third thing we have done is put a satellite in space. Paksat I is now fully operational. And under this, we are starting four new TV channels which will start operating from June 15 under the auspices of the virtual university programme, exclusively for education. They are already running on a trial basis.
We also concentrating on books as well. We will start publishing low-cost books according to the curricula of different universities. The programme is going up to Ecnec for approval and I expect that the programme will be approved in two to three months' time. I want the books to be available at the seminar rooms of all the departments so that they could be loaned to students. They will be published by the National Book Foundation. Under this programme we will purchase the books which are available cheaply.
The other pillar of this programme is curriculum. I was horrified to discover that the curricula have not been revised for 20 to 30 years. In the last one year we have revised 105 curricula in all subjects which have been distributed to all the universities. Committees were formed not just of academics but also private sector representatives and users. We are also developing an entrepreneurship development programme which has been lacking in our universities. I want that a student should also know how to form a company, how to get a bank loan and how to draw a business plan to get the loan. We are also establishing in all the universities students counselling centres to guide them about job opportunities.
The examination systems are largely designed at the moment to test memory rather than understanding of the basic principles and ability to apply them. An examination committee is looking at the possibilities of improvement. I want to be very careful that I don't intrude in the affairs of the universities. The Higher Education Commission has a totally non-intrusive role. Ultimately the universities must themselves decide what is to be done. We have given guidelines. In two or three months we will make public our suggestions about reforms in the examination system. Perhaps a blend of the semester system and the annual examination system. A critical factor would be the external examination.
Q: In other countries where the semester system is followed students have the option of skipping a semester to work and earn for further studies. But in our country, where poverty is widespread, why is this option not available to students?
A: This is one of our suggestions. But we are going farther than what you have just said. We would like the system to be flexible so that if a student wants to switch subjects after some time, he should be able to do so, as long as he or she can meet the required standards. There should be no time barrier. But these are my views. The examination committee will come out with its recommendations in two to three months.
We are also recommending linking our educational programme with our development plan. The prime minister has now charged me with preparing such a national strategy. We have about 20 committees, comprising subjects experts, private sector representatives and economists because we are talking about GDP growth. I don't want a big wish list. In each sector we will focus on two or three areas and come out with a national strategy.
Q: But when you have a situation in which thousands of industries have been closed down, when a large number of people have been retrenched, when there are limited employment opportunities how are you going to absorb thousands of people who would graduate with higher skills?
A: This precisely is the reason why you have to identify opportunities for Pakistan. The world is changing very rapidly. China is coming up as a big supplier of different types of merchandise. We have to explore the areas where such opportunities do exist. In the area of design you have great opportunities. Your asset is about 90 million people below the age of 30 who don't lack in creativity. You have to train them in appropriate fashion.
- The Dawn Dialogue team comprised Zubeida Mustafa, Mukhtar Alam Khan, Bahzad Alam Khan and Shamim-ur-Rahman .
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