Higher Educ-ation Commission (HEC) will grant 20 scholarships to deserving students under Pakistan's first ever media scholarship programme. This unique scholarship programme will cover costs of tuition fee for two-year of Master degrees in Mass Communication, Journalism and Media studies from any public sector university in Pakistan.
Talking to APP, Project Director of the Scholarship Programmes HEC Asif Kaleem said the scholarship programme was designed in collaboration with a private television Channel in 2008 to benefit those students who are striving for better education, but lack financial resources to do so.
To grant the 20 scholarships, applications have been invited for admission in the next degree course and the last date of submitting documents is February 13. On the completion of their studies, the successful candidates will be offered a one year job contract with the private television channel in a department of their own choice with a salary package at par with the salary earned by journalists in the media industry.
The scholarships will be awarded to 10 male and 10 female students from all the four provinces, federal capital and the Fata region to promote female students and ensure representation from all parts of the country.
According to the Global Competitiveness Report (GCR) 2009, which is annually published by the World Economic Forum and ranks the competitiveness of countries world-wide, this year Pakistan has been ranked 118th on the higher education index. "Through such scholarship programmes, we will be supporting the global competitiveness ranking of Pakistan and position our country on a stronger footing to reach international standards," he said.
Advisor on Human Resource Development (HRD) HEC, Dr Riaz Qureshi said more than half of the total budget of HEC is being spent on the scholarship programmes to overcome the weaknesses of higher education sector in the country. The students are facing so many problems in higher education sector and there are unresolved issues regarding quality of education, admissions and exorbitant fees and sometimes students are forced to discontinue their studies.
'MS leading to PhD' is the largest programme of HEC, which extends scholarships to the students every year. As the education sector has been expanding so there is shortage of well qualified teaching staff and HEC is offering six-month and nine-month scholarship programmes to train teachers, Dr Riaz said.
Dr Riaz Qureshi informed that HEC has requested the universities to identify the fields in which PhDs and specialised teachers are needed. In the coming four to five years, there will be sufficient number of PhD teachers in the country. The HRD Division of HEC is managing a wide array of scholarship programs with the financial assistance of the government.
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