'HEC aims at seeing 15 Pak varsities among world's top-500' an interview with Dr Tariq Banuri, Chairman Higher Education Commission

After obtaining his B.E. (Civil Engineering) from University of Peshawar and M.A. (Development Economics) from Williams College, Dr Tariq Banuri started his career with the Civil Services of Pakistan. A few years later, he attended Harvard University to pursue Ph.D. in Economics. Previously, Dr Banuri served as a research fellow at the UN's University World Institute for Development Economics Research and later worked as a Coordinating Lead Author on the Nobel Prize winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr Banuri was also the founding Executive Director, Sustainable Development Policy Institute. He also served as member, Board of Governors, State Bank of Pakistan. Prior to joining the HEC, Dr Banuri was serving as a Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, United States.
BR Research recently sat down with the eminent academic to discuss his plans for higher education in the country. Selected excerpts are produced below:
BR Research: Back in 2002, you were part of the Steering Committee on higher-education reforms that led to the creation of the HEC. Before you took charge at the HEC this June, what was your view of the strengths and weaknesses of this apex body?
Dr Tariq Banuri: On the positive side, the higher-education sector has made a lot of progress in the last 15 years in several areas. First, back in 2001-02, somewhere around 250,000 students were enrolled in higher-education institutions (HEIs). Now, depending on what you count and what you don't, the enrollment at the HEIs is between two million and three million. It's a tenfold increase in 15 years - simply phenomenal. Higher education has now become a norm in this country among middle- and low-income classes, compared to a generation ago, when demand and awareness for higher-education was present mostly among the upper classes. These sheer numbers have created the possibility for people to think differently.
Second, prior to 2002, research wasn't a priority in academia. Now, research has become their central preoccupation. There are, of course, problems with it - such as quality of research, incidence of plagiarism, etc - but the fact that academics now think favourably about research is a big cultural change.
And third, professorship has become a prized and aspired profession. This kind of a change has taken place in the last 15 years. It's a change that you can't see just in the numbers - it's a change in the people's minds.
While all of that is an indication of success, it has created more problems. Now, we need to fix those problems. The one word that I will use to describe those problems is 'quality'. One way or the other, eighty percent of the issues we now face in the higher-education sector can be traced back to the issue of quality. The quality of education - teaching and mentoring - has suffered. This quality has suffered partly because of explosive growth in enrollment, partly because of gaps in teachers' and professors' training, and partly because of the infrastructural challenges we face.
The second issue that needs to be addressed is the 'relevance' of education. Does acquiring a certificate or a degree allow an individual to become a valuable member of the society? The answer to this question goes beyond employment and includes an individual's political and cultural contributions.
The third issue is in research. There has been an explosion in the number of research papers and the number of journals. There were 200 articles published a year prior to 2002; now, 12,000 articles come out every year. But the quality of research has not improved proportionally.
With the view to provide incentives and certainty to the professors teaching at the universities, the HEC had set up the tenure track system (TTS). But the TTS has led to a large number of problems. Another issue is that the 'scale' itself has become a problem.
BRR: So you have outlined a number of issues. Let's go through the probable causes one by one. Is the 'structure' an issue here? We ask because post-devolution, gaps in federal-provincial coordination may have been hurting the process of formulating quality standards and evaluating them across the country?
Dr Banuri: This is not an issue anymore. The federal HEC and the provincial HECs are partners. As long as we are both committed to quality, we have no problems. We know that we are in a new terrain, so everyone is experimenting. Our role, as the apex, is to ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction. We have the mandate and the resources to do that. The quality standards have to be universal and the provincial HECs have to help us achieve those.
We now know from the global education system is that education thrives in places where educational institutions are autonomous. The purpose of the HEC was to ensure that we move towards a system of greater autonomy. To a certain extent, we have done that, by providing the resources, by providing the structure to utilize those resources, and by advising on the curriculum, and so forth. We now need to accelerate that process. As long as the HEC and the provincial bodies are committed to the autonomy of the universities and helping them build their capacities, we have no problems.
BRR: Autonomy is a good thing. But critics maintain that a number of public-sector universities do not have adequate internal-control systems and code of governance. Those administrative lapses then seep into the eventual result: substandard academic outcomes. How will you balance the conflicting needs for supervision and autonomy?
Dr Banuri: Our role is both supportive and regulatory. The supportive role is to help the HEIs reach a certain level of development. And the regulatory role is to set minimum standards so that HEIs don't fall below those standards. I think these two are complementary roles.
When I talk about more autonomy for a university, I am basically asking: what does a university have to do in order to earn that autonomy? So what a university have to do is this: set up transparent systems in which people have a lot of confidence. If you set up a system with proper care, it will minimize friction. But the problems we have today are due to adhocism. This issue is on my radar. We want to help universities set up their systems so that they can take their decisions themselves.
BRR: We have structure out of the way. What about the issue of 'funding'? The HEC chiefs before you have argued for more funding. After joining, you have also recently touched the topic, when you advocated that the HEC's funding should at least be one percent of GDP. Can you explain where you are coming from?
Dr Banuri: Let me step back a little. At its heart, education is simply the relationship between a teacher and a student. At the elementary level of education, you can have a small number of teachers for a large number of students and still be able to maintain quality education. But as you move up the education system; the demands on the time of the teacher become higher and higher.
Globally, the faculty-to-student ratio in higher education is one to ten. That makes higher education really expensive. So the number I was talking about - one percent of GDP - comes from the fact that we have a very large cohort of young people - but not all of them can afford the kind of quality education that the society needs.
At the time when the HEC was being set up, higher-education was getting government spending at less than 0.1 percent of GDP. We had recommended in 2002 to bring the spending up to one percent of GDP. It went up to 0.35 percent of GDP in the mid-2000s. Last year, it was 0.25 percent of GDP. This is not enough.
Since the sector is growing ten percent every year and we are still not reaching everybody, we want the federal government to make two commitments. Number one: the government will not freeze the HEC's financing level, rather it must grow the financing by at least ten percent every year. And number two: the government will help us reach the one percent of GDP target as quickly as possible. Without reaching that target, we cannot provide higher education to all the people who are eligible for higher education.
BRR: Where that money will be spent requires serious consideration, especially given the need for quality you spoke about earlier. Some critics maintain that more campuses are being built at the cost of improving quality of education in existing campuses.
Dr Banuri: Right now, we have between two million to three million students enrolled in HEIs. This number is growing about ten percent every year. And it will continue to grow until we reach everybody who wants higher education in this country. The demand is exploding.
When the number of students is growing at ten percent per annum, you need, at least, ten percent more faculty every year, ten percent more classrooms, ten percent more laboratories, ten percent more parking spaces, ten percent more buses, and so forth. In some sense, the overall higher education system has to keep on expanding. Due to issues regarding affordable access and population growth, there is no escaping expansion in this sector.
BRR: Let's pivot to research. Recently, you talked about the need for a National Research Agenda. There are pressing themes - such as water, energy, urbanization and climate change - that require buildup of academic capital. Under your leadership, what will be your guidelines in this regard for universities and future scholarships?
Dr Banuri: Research is about curiosity. What I would like to see is that people get excited about issues, think about them, do research, and contribute to the society's knowledge - whatever the theme! But, I also want to say, as an elder, that I want to put something on your table in the hope that you might get piqued by this. The National Research Agenda will be based on that spirit. It will not be a straitjacket.
We are talking to the ministries of Planning, Science & Technology, Health, Agriculture, Food Security, and some others to devise the research agenda. There will be priority areas, to which we would like our people to apply their minds. We can ask universities and consortiums to apply for funding with the commitment that they will give us research-based solutions in a particular theme of interest within a defined time period.
BRR: One way to produce high-quality research could be to attract and retain top-quality Pakistani professors, who are teaching in top world universities, to come and teach in the public-sector universities back home. What are your thoughts on this matter?
Dr Banuri: An academic has two sides. One side is the accessibility of their work to everybody. The other side is their person-to-person interaction. We do have a sizable Pakistani diaspora in academics.
What I am trying to do is make sure their writings should become more accessible to us. Besides, we can make inroads into their personal time. We don't need them all round the year. If an overseas Pakistani professor agrees to give 10 days to a programme, let's bring them in. Additionally, without moving, these academics can facilitate our students to study and do research in universities abroad.
BRR: Finally, what are your views on the ranking of universities?
Dr Banuri: It always depends on how well the rankings are done. There are many ranking systems which are extremely flawed and hence give the wrong signals to the market. My own view on this subject - and this is the reason why I have put a stop to the HEC's own ranking system - is that unless we do the rankings right, it is going to be a counter-productive exercise.
BRR: Do you have a target for Pakistani universities ranking in the world, eg QS World University Rankings?
Dr Banuri: My target is that by the time I leave this organisation, I would like to see 15 Pakistani universities in the top-500 universities across the world - currently, there is only one - and 15 Pakistani universities in the top-100 universities across Asia.