On University Reform 
by Dr. Abdus Samad

posted on December 12, 2001

The reform of our universities may be an important cornerstone of any plan to develop our economy. It has been amply proven around the world that Without the resuscitation of education and research in this country, it would not be possible to achieve growth. Unless we have one university that is competitive with the research and academic standards of the lowest level in industrial countries we cannot hope to produce the quality teachers and teaching material for the school and college levels that modern education requires. An examination of the evolution of the major education systems in Europe and America would show that quality research and teaching at the university level feeds back into all other levels of education thus improving the overall standard of education. And that is the key to economic and social progress. Any successful reform of our universities must be based on the following principles:

1. Realistic and meaningful fee structure: University education in every country is acquired by the relatively better off. Someone who can afford to remain out of the labor force in his or her late teens is by definition not a member of the poorest segment of our society. Many of those attending our universities have paid large fees for private schools before joining the university. By keeping the university fee as low as we have, we are subsidizing the rich. College and university fees should instantaneously be raised to realistic levels. This fee increase could be supplemented by a scholarship program for the deserving needy students.
   
   Currently, Punjab University charges a monthly fee of Rs 30-50 per student whereas it costs the government and the community about Rs. 3000-4000 to educate the student. That means that per student there is an average subsidy of over Rs. 3000. In contrast the business schools and other private colleges that have been set up charge somewhere in the region of Rs. 5,000-20,000 per month and there is a strong demand for those schools. If Punjab university were to increase its fee only to Rs. 1000 and still maintain about a large subsidy to the students, it can expand its resource base by about a third. That money can be well spent in terms of buying quality teachers as discussed below.
   
   A fee increase would have the additional advantage of making the students serious and the parents conscious of the need to get their money's worth. Today, parents, quite rationally, seem to believe in the two principles that, "you get what you pay for", and "if you want your child to have a future, you send that child overseas and not to Pakistani university". With a fee increase, parents and students would demand a quality education. They would be conscious of the wastage of time in terms of delayed examinations and long lags between exams and results. Teachers would have to recognize that they have to provide education programs that are worth their client's money.
   
2. Quality and well-paid teaching staff: The most important asset of any educational institution is a quality teacher. The whole university system in the all major universities is geared towards attracting the best professors and retaining them. Salaries, perks, positions and research grants are all negotiable when it comes to getting the best. In some cases universities have even been known to accommodate spouses to attract a real star to a department. Rapid promotion, early tenure are all available to the best and brightest. Noted professors are paid more than the VC and have an independent standing and are not answerable to the VC. Locking professors to grade 18 or 19 for a number of years with no hope of promotion without even the perks of the grades that the bureaucracy enjoys ensured that education is absolutely the last choice of the best and brightest. Is it not strange that we expect a person to invest in a Ph.d and teach and research and yet have no hope of going beyond grade 20 while the students progress to grade 22 with only a BA and an entry to a closed system.
   
   The National Pay Scales may now be acing as the single most important constraint on the flow of quality human capital into the education system. The education system must be allowed to break free of this constraint and develop the quality of its teachers by the pure economic means of paying more to attract quality. If the banking sector and PIA can be on scales that are different from the Nationa Pay Scales, why not the education sector? The sector must pay adequately to attract away quality people from other sectors. Emulate the tenure rules of American universities. Young academics must fight for tenure by means of their peer-reviewed publications. However, the current system of faculty recruitment is clearly flawed since we lose academics every year to the western world and hardly ever attract any back. Moreover, the current system provides no incentives for improved academic pursuits to those who gain tenured entry to it. Interestingly enough, no department in any of our universities ever holds a seminar whereas, each department in the major universities overseas holds a large number of seminars a week. Again most departments in universities are teaching from early in the morning to late in the evening and students are in the library till the wee hours of the morning. Our universities are virtually asleep by noon and students have nothing better to do than look for trouble.
   
3. Hard budgets and raising of resources: Universities must be clearly informed of the grant that they can receive and the indicators of quality and efficiency that they must report on an annual basis. Their grants should be based on such indicators. In addition to these grants, universities must also be encouraged to raise resources from the community by means of generating donations and fundraisers. Such activities increase the control of the community on the university.
   
4. Decentralized decision-making: Most quality universities have decentralized decisionmaking vis a vis course selection, syllabi, appointments etc. This is the only rational approach given the nature of specialization required at this level. It is hard to imagine how the current centralized committees can assess and appoint professors in physics, sociology, economics, biology on the basis of interviews. How can one committee assess the academic worth of all these diverse areas. Our universities and colleges must attempt to find a good faculty to man departments, give them stature equivalent to himself, and then hand over several of these key decisions to the faculty. Much of the current stock of human capital in our educational establishments must, however, be rapidly replaced in any reform is to succeed. Fresh and vigorous academic blood will be needed.
   
5. Emphasize research: The current university system emphasizes administration if you look at the fact that some 80% of its expenditure is on administration and 95% of its staff is administration. Moreover, there are no research funds or incentives to research. Hardly any teachers have contributed to foreign journals or are on the editorial boards of such journals. Anecdotes abound about how the esteemed members of the ruling elite of the university are unaware of the importance of such academic pursuits as journal contributions and their worth. Research funds should be made available and rules set such that the fate of the administrators of universities depends on the quality of academics that are hired by the universities and the research that is conducted by these universities.
   
6. Encourage competition among universities: All universities in the country must be made to compete with each other in terms of academic excellence. Standardized testing is a means by which the students of the various universities can be compared to each other. Other indicators, such as success in the job market of the successful graduates of the concerned universities, can be reported upon. Similarly, the research the teachers and its standing among peers will be another area where universities will compete.
   
   At the same time as discussed above, the university budgeting and hiring, firing, and salary level must be left upto the university. In particular, universities must be in a position to compete for high quality resources such as teachers to improve their relative image. A successful university will have to be very imaginatively run in this scheme. It must raise resources that are required for achieving a name for itself. However, in order to attract resources it must make a name for itself academically and in research.
   
7. Implementation and foreign collaboration: There are many ways to implement this plan. Perhaps our universities and colleges should seek collaboration with some large university overseas. To begin with, recruitment, promotion, course-selection and syllabi decisions of departments can be contracted out to a foreign collaborating university. This is an approach the private sector is already quite effectively using to signal quality.
   
   To give the university stature, aid agencies could be asked to devote some of their money to setting up prestigious high paying chairs at the concerned university (the appointments to be made by major universities overseas).

In the final analysis, there is no escaping the issue of political will. The government will have to make the unpleasant decision of raising fees, removing the current vested interests, and signalling an earnestness of staying the course with the reform-- a very big statesman-like task not befitting our political pygmies.

from http://users.erols.com/ziqbal/univ.htm