Breaking the elitist myth of higher education is a challenging but important task: Executive Director, HEC

Professor Dr S. Sohail H. Naqvi has been the Executive Director of the Higher Education Commission since September 2004. He has worked in academia from 1988-99, as Professor and Dean Faculty of Electronics at GIK Institute Pakistan and as Associate Professor (and Assistant Professor) of Electrical Engineering at the University of New Mexico, USA.
He has also worked in the private sector as Staff Scientist in Bio-Rad Inc where he helped commercialise a novel measurement technique that proved useful in semiconductor manufacturing. He remained Vice President, Operations at Enabling Technologies in Pakistan from 2000-02.
Dr Naqvi is the author of numerous internationally referred research publications and holds three patents to his name. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, USA, in 1988.
BR Research: Please tell us about your association with the Commission?
Dr Sohail Naqvi: I have been with the HEC since its very inception. I was a member of the steering committee in 2002 which the President of Pakistan had constituted to restructure the Higher Education system in Pakistan. Prior to that, Pakistan had established a task force to review the state and future of higher education in Pakistan; and creation of HEC was a part of that committee's recommendations. I have been the part of this whole process and got on board in 2002. Initially, for the first two years, I was responsible for the scholarship programmes, development projects, etc. Since 2004, I have been serving the Commission as its Executive Director.
BRR: How did HEC manage to withstand the pressure from some quarters that Higher Education must be devolved after the 18th Amendment?
SN: The Commission is coming out of a turbulent period, in the backdrop of democratic transition in Pakistan and realignment of the priorities of a new government. The process of devolution, in which the subject of Education was to be devolved, added to the pressure. It is clearly mentioned in the Schedule II that Higher Education is a separate, distinct subject. Higher Education and Research go hand in hand, and Research is clearly a Federal subject. The functions and tasks of the HEC, therefore, are in accordance with the letter and spirit of the 18th Amendment. International experience has also shown that not only higher education is to be treated distinct from other tiers of education, but also it is normally dealt with at a centralised level, because of its strategic nature, research linkages and exclusivity.
HEC was indeed on the chopping block, to be broken up into parts, in the recent past. Fortunately, there was realisation and rethinking at the government level following strong support from the community that is the real stakeholder of the HEC: the students, faculty, researchers, etc. I believe that HEC is now coming back to its original position as a Federal entity, serving Pakistan, even as necessary changes are being made to address the issues like different Higher Education needs of four distinct provinces. To address such concerns, we now have a policy mixture of merit and quota.
I feel that now we are really on our way to get HEC to move with full steam ahead. Development funding has started to flow. And this is the harbinger of a positive future and continued growth of the Higher Education sector in Pakistan.
BRR: How much progress has been made in Higher Education since the HEC's establishment?
SN: A lot! To give a few statistics, we had nearly 2 lac students pursuing higher education in 2002, and this number is close to one million students now. Access of 17-23-year olds to higher education was 2.6 percent in 2002, it is 7.8 percent now. We had less than 50 universities back in 2002; we now have 130 of them. Universities have been opened in second and third tier cities of Pakistan - they are now in Bannu, Gujrat, Kohat, Sargodha, Sukkur, and other cities, doing world class work.
Pakistan has the second fastest rate of growth in research publications in the world at this time. In the last ten years, our research ranking in the world has gone up 12 positions. We are at number 43 right now, which means that we are taking a greater share of the world research. There were less than 300 Ph.D. dissertations from Pakistan in 2002. These are now approaching 900 in 2012. From 800 research publications in 2002, last year saw 6,300 research publications from Pakistan.
Our universities have now broken through the international rankings, and Pakistan now has six ranked universities. These are the Aga Khan University, Lahore University of Management Sciences, National University of Science and Technology, Quaid-e-Azam University, UET Lahore and the University of Lahore. These rankings are improving every year. We have focused on standardised quality enhancement procedures through dedicated cells which are now present in 85 universities. We have started ranking the local universities and we also publish research rankings separately so that there is more competition and awareness. The rollout of split programmes and joint-degree programmes with foreign universities is a good indication of the development of local universities.
However, we still need to increase the number of graduates our universities are producing, to meet the target of 10 percent (relative to population) by 2015. We are currently at 8 percent graduate ratio, and we need to push heavily for more investment in higher education. However, a rapidly expanding population is a big challenge for higher education, for there is a continuous, increasing influx of 17-23-year olds.
BRR: There is a growing perception that Higher Education in Pakistan is diverging more towards Social Sciences than Engineering, Science and Technology. What do you say to that?
SN: I am glad, if people are thinking that HEC is diverging more towards social sciences, because we have been actively working on that. After the detailed assessment of the state of Higher Education in Pakistan, the first strategy we developed for the period 2005-10 was to address the issues of access, quality and relevance. We focused more on faculty development than infrastructure building during that period to get the research going and to develop the ecosystem of higher education.
For the first 55 years, there were hardly five or six Ph.D. dissertations in Engineering. There was hardly anything that was going on in Sciences; there was little work in Physics, Chemistry, etc. The HEC's entire focus in the beginning was towards Science and Technology and Engineering sciences. We have been funding new campuses, endowment funds, equipment, scholarships, etc. Later, we focused on the medical sciences, and then the agricultural sciences. Systematically, we worked on building up Sciences education. Even today, significant portion of funds are going towards Sciences.
Social sciences required a different strategy, due to different sets of challenges such as language, impact of school education, local journals, etc. Without the ability of analysis and expression (partly due to low primary schooling), it is hard to lay a foundation for good humanities and social science education. It's not a funding issue with the Social Sciences, as it is in Engineering Sciences. It's just that there are a unique set of challenges that needed to be dealt with in a separate manner by the relevant experts of the respective subjects.
BRR: What is the landscape of innovation in Higher Education in Pakistan?
SN: We have developed second phase of our strategy, which covers the period of 2011-15. It is about universities building economies, communities and leadership. That's where innovation comes in. First, we had to get the universities going, and get the ecosystem of research established. Now, building economies means the application phase. That is where the innovation comes in through start-ups and entrepreneurship. We are now in this phase, pushing the universities, so that they can do it sustaining on their own.
We have established the "Offices of Research, Innovation, and Commercialisation" (ORICs) in various universities. The idea is to institutionalise these offices, train the students and let them drive the innovation process themselves. Now, you are seeing competitions across universities. For instance, the IBA in Karachi and the MIT are working together on innovation competitions in Karachi.
We also have a programme for international patenting for work that has been carried out from Pakistan, and we are working with an attorney in the US towards that. We are also working with the universities to establish "Business Incubation Centers" (BICs), where small office space and secretarial support is provided to get students going with their business ideas. This is already happening in universities in Peshawar, Sukkur, Lahore and other places. We are putting the infrastructure together for this purpose. Things are beginning to break through, as several start-ups are coming up. Students are developing mobile applications and making lot of money, as did a group of students from NUST recently.
Strategically, we are focusing on the BICs, business plan competitions, and foreign training of the ORIC employees on all aspects of business and entrepreneurship.
BRR: Why is there little policy use of economic research done by universities in Pakistan? Is it that there are no takers? Or is that the research lacks focus and is less relevant to the issues?
SN: It is both, actually. According to independent, third-party assessments, Pakistan was ranked 96th in the world for Economic Research in 2000. Today, we are ranked 35th. Huge difference has occurred in terms of the number of research papers published in the country. The interaction of research with policymakers is beginning to happen, but it is not quite there yet. The fact that you have the former Governor of SBP, Dr Ishrat Husain, leading the IBA, brings a lot of prestige and focus to academic research in economics and business issues. Eminent economists like Dr Hafeez Pasha, former finance minister Sartaj Aziz, are also linked to the academia now. LUMS is also engaged in policy work.
The collaboration has to be on both sides, and the recipient has to be there as much as the producer of the research. For one, we are not seeing that much policy work being contracted out by the government departments, like the Commerce and Industries divisions. Secondly, universities need to reach out more. So, the onus lies on both sides. The promising thing is that universities have set up policy research centers and serious policy inputs are only going to increase in the future.
BRR: But the link between academia and industry seems to be missing, too.
SN: The academia-industry interaction is small, but it is not totally missing. For instance, load shedding is a big problem in Pakistan, and there are all kinds of gadgets produced by local universities, like small, solid-state IC UPS's. Engineers from some universities have come up with more efficient UPS devices and they are trying to commercialise them. High-yielding sugar cane crops have been planted by the University of Sargodha. The Agriculture University of Faisalabad is testing various types of crop seeds. Lot of work is going on in animal feed and husbandry.
Right now, I can only quote isolated examples here. It is a slow process, but it is happening. For more industry-academia linkages, we are trying to conduct a 'Higher Education Business Community Interaction' survey, and are trying to put a rupee value on the level of interaction and then reward such universities that are doing well. We are trying to put those structures in place. ORICs can be very instrumental here.