PAKISTANI universities have mastered the art of raising the bar while removing the ladder. Students are expected to perform at increasingly demanding academic standards, multiple exams, research assignments, presentations and internships, while the institutional support required to meet those standards quietly disappears. Counselling services, where they exist at all, are understaffed to the point of being decorative. A single counsellor serving thousands of students is not a mental health resource; it is a liability shield for administration. Libraries lack current journals. Faculty office hours are a formality few professors honour. And when a student breaks under the weight of it all, the system’s response is not reform; it is a medical leave form.

The financial dimension compounds this further. Semester fee hikes have become annual rituals at both public and private institutions, justified with promises of improved facilities that rarely materialise. Students pay more, receive less, and are expected to perform better. When they fail to do so, the failure is recorded as a personal grade, a warning letter or a year lost, but never institutional. What is being produced under these conditions is not academic excellence. It is a generation of exhausted, anxious graduates who have learned to survive a system, not to think within one. That is a catastrophic return on a family’s investment and a nation’s future.

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) must require all universities to publish verifiable data on every critical aspect of the deal, and must tie accreditation to minimum standard. Pressure without support is not education. It is mere attrition.

Muhammad Mudassar
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2026