IT: Need to Get the Basics Right

Education is a basic right, or so we were told. Somehow, someone forgot to tell us that rights could also be bought. The mushroom growth of so-called professional colleges in the private sector, during the past decade, on the pretext of providing specialized education is unbelievable. It seems that like all the other luxuries in life, quality education is also now a privilege, reserved for the moneyed few.

First it was only information technology and management degrees but recently degrees in art, architecture law and medicine have also been put up on the auction block, for sale to the highest bidder. This article will cover only issues related to IT education in the country. However, it should be kept in mind that much of what applies to this particular field can also be applied to other disciplines.

It is a good sign that new institutes offering competition and hence better options for students are opening but the exponential rise does raise some eyebrows.

The reason for this probably has to do with the fact that education is now a good investment. Hence, new institutions are coming on the scene or existing ones are expanding to offer new courses. Some IT institutions are now themselves degree-granting institutions or have affiliation with an institution that does the same. However, there are many, which have neither, usually only a claim that what they offer is recognized, and they churn out graduates without any proper recognition or standardized curriculum.

Many institutes are chartered in one city or province but are running campuses all over the country- like franchises they have their “outlets” in many cities. The non-recognized institutes are found especially in the smaller cities of Pakistan. Recently, a decision by the Punjab Government to close down illegal institutions in its jurisdiction caused quite a media furore because of the well-known names that are apparently functioning illegally in the province.

A distinct lack of educational and career guidance makes students and their parents blindly follow the latest trends. Studying information technology is one such fad, notwithstanding the fact that in the west the dotcom bubble burst and dealt a heavy blow to the field. Despite that, many people in Pakistan believe that knowledge of IT is the key to professional success. The sad thing is that even after spending a lot of money a significant proportion of IT graduates are not able to get jobs in the country.

IT undergraduate programs in the private sector do not come cheap. One year costs anywhere from Rs. 43,000 to as much as Rs. 200,000. The average annual tuition fee for IT degree is around Rs. 100,000 and this does not include other expenses like admission fees, security deposit, club fess, degree charges, semester registration fee, library fee, laboratory fee or the fee for courses taken during the summer semester. While government run institutions offering courses in information technology are a whole lot cheaper, several have followed the lead of the private sector and begun charging high tuition fees under the so-called ‘self-financing’ scheme.
The rush for admission into an IT degree course is great and inevitably leads to cutthroat competition between the institutions that offer them. Last year three local colleges had their entrance tests on the same day, probably a deliberate step forcing prospective students to make a choice where they wanted to apply.

Mrs. Ikram, who has a son enrolled in a local IT institute in Islamabad says that she didn’t have the resources to send her child to a well-known university offering a degree in information technology even though he passed the admission test. He is now studying in a lesser known institution which charges a lower fee, but the expenses are still quite steep, so much so that the household budget has to be planned in such a way that enough is left over to pay the son’s fee.

The high fess might be bearable if the facilities and infrastructure were good and state-of-the-art. But that normally is not the case, except in the case of a handful of institutions. We have entire universities, or at least claiming to be one, operating in a house. Even if we let go of the fact that these establishments have no recreational facilities or enough breathing space we cannot forego the need for proper computer labs and classrooms, without which an IT education would be quite hard to obtain.

Some private IT institutes initially have promising starts but like ISP’s they take on too many customers (read students). Each passing year stretches resources, which might have been okay for the first year’s intake but compromise the ability of the institution to offer quality education.
The establishment of many IT institutes in the private sector has over time caused a surplus of graduates- while jobs have not grown as expected. Umer 20, a second year student says that the computer lab facility in his university is inadequate because three students have to share a computer between them. As assignment deadlines approach, students end up wasting precious time simply standing in the lab waiting for a terminal to become free. He also says that though the institution has its own network server, it is usually quite unreliable and slow.

IT institutions, just like their counterparts in any other academic discipline, also cash in on their name. The problem though, is that once they have an established identity there doesn’t seem to be too much of an emphasis on improvement and things, in terms of quality, can become stagnant. What these institutions ignore is that the good name will last only if there is consistency in results and in quality of education being imparted. Besides, a degree from a brand name institution can help one land a job but cannot guarantee that the graduate will keep his job. In that context, the curriculum that the graduate was exposed to and studied in university assumes significance. Apart from teaching technical skills to students, our IT curriculum also needs to impart skills that come handy in the workplace, such as communication and writing skills, leadership, time management or even knowledge that could be used to market a product.

A teacher from International Islamic University in Islamabad says that the IT curriculum taught by local universities should be revised because in its current form it has too narrow a focus. One reason why graduates from India were being so much sought after, he said, is that they possessed highly developed non-technical skills. To be successful, in today’s cutthroat world, students need to be taught to have a broader view of things.

Our IT graduates should know that there is more to information technology than programming. This means that other than programmers, those who study IT can become business analysts, managers, marketing managers or even something as creative as a graphic designer. Programmers play their own part in the manufacture of software but in the end success can only happen as a result of a team effort. As if the emphasis on programming weren’t a problem, many IT students also tend to shy away from research. One reason for this might be the dearth of qualified research supervisors or advisors who can provide sound advice to students.

There are, however, some positives. Graduates of some private IT institutes have instituted scholarship schemes to help financially needy students. Recent initiatives by the Higher Education Commission for the promotion of IT education bode well for the future of research. A scholarship scheme begun by the ministry of science and technology some years ago helped many deserving students get an IT education. Over time, some corporations have also begun to recognize the importance of IT education and have donated licensed software, provided training to employees, sponsored courses and offered internship programs to students.

The key, though, is to get the basics right. This means having a broad-based curriculum, more resources especially in terms of a lower student-computer ratio, and a universally accepted and credible accreditation mechanism to monitor the quality of education being imparted and to authenticate claims made in reference to acceptance of degrees offered.