Reforms! What Reforms?

Romair
its a pure numbers game. the number of graduates is high so number who want to hang around is high and they produce high number of students. this machine was primed once and its in motion.

getting a prof job in iits etc is very hard.. you need a good degree, not from that IIT, and post doc experience. getting eq. of tenure is also hard..incl a lot of peer pressure. iit professors have nice lifestyle (a nice house, campus facilities) and make good money with conmsulting and summer work with MNCs and/or foreign univs/lab (e.g. IBM s Watson Lab).

Third tier engg colleges faculty in india plain sucks. those who cannot find a real job, teach in these colleges.. most students join private classes to understand thermodynamics and maxwells equations.

IT is the easy one.. in india, except computer science, we think IT needs little education ;-)
many hydrabadis i know personally have ``faked`` it into IT and learned on the job...e.g. QA, or scripts etc.

Re: #3 Charlie

By looking at
http://chowk.com/show_interactor_page.cgi?membername=Charlie

it seems quite fair to infer ur bias towards HEC as a result of ur free ticket to the farangi land.

Anyway, enjoy ur stay !

Re: # 7

Well! I have the scholarship of government of France. I didn`t get a single penny of HEC. All I said was what I saw from the students coming abroad in recent years. And no doubt, HEC is working well.

While people like prof Hoodbhoy criicise the system very easily, they always fail to propose an alternative solution implementable practically. Being idealistic is fine, spreading pessimism is not.

Netizen #4: There is something I have always wanted to find out. How are Indian universities able to keep their teaching faculty........?

I don`t know much about other depts in Pakistani universities, but I do know something about CS. And in CS, the problem in Pakistan is lack of faculty. The students are there, the building is there, the equipment is generally there, even the good jobs are there. But there is no faculty..........

The only institutions that have been able to keep faculty are in the military, due to strict laws and bonds. And universities like LUMS, which pay a phenomenally high salary to the faculty.

GIK was one of the fastest rising Engineering colleges in Asia. Within a few years of its formation, it was ranked 9th in Asia, ahead of some of the IITs. However, it has moved down now, because it started losing faculty. I as looking at the faculty salary of GIK and IIT, at the time when a lot of GIK professors started leaving, and it turns out they were getting paid more than IIT professors. And they were, at that time, in a young institution, which was ranked so high in Asia. Yet they still left, to the point that the GIK students even had a strike, complaining about the faculty leaving...........

Excellent article, a real eye-openner.
Agreed, many so-called reforms are being introduced by the HEC, but the real dilemma remains, that it `s sheer emphasis is on quantity rather than quality. As Dr Hoodbhoy correctly pointed out, the Rs 5000 allowance being offered to the supervisors for every PhD student, only impells them into taking as many students into their supervision as they can, and thats only in balck and white. These supervisors at the same time, have to teach under-graduate classes (even if they bother to do that aptly), and that leaves them little or no time to focus on a couple of students, let alone dozens of them. The result is obvious, incompetent students, who are only intersted in the Rs 5,6, or 7 thousand stipend they get from the HEC, and have no real enthusiasm to gain knowledge. And those who do retain that, lose it in the long run owing to the lack of supervision and academic competition and competence.
The imbalance in the allocation of money to different sectors, is also rampant. HEc`s major focus for the last few years has been IT. So much so that there was such a huge lot of IT students in the very irst year of the program, that more than 80% of the graduates belonging to the very second lot remained un employed, so ultimately had to switch to some other descipline.
On the other hand, a barely noticeable attention is being payed to `promotion` of pure scinces, promotion as in advanced faculty, instead of advanced technology. The accelerators being installed or being planned in the coming years are useless if their are no technicians to work at them, and no proper physicists to extract any uselfull data from them. In this age of LHC, probing into the energy range of 14 TeV, a Van de graff accelerator of mere 5MeV, is pointless and an absolute wastage of money. Instead of giving away so many `indigeneous scholarships` in the field of IIt, resulting in the saturation of students yeilding degrees int hsi category, the emphasis should be on proper and proportionate allocation of money and advancement of reseach in pure sciences, which are at the verge of extinction in Pakistan.
The conditions are severely deplorable in the Pakistan education system, from the base to the top, no doubt.

Good analysis.

there are a few things I wuld like to add though:

entrance tests for IIT`s known as Joint Entrance Exams(JEE) are really competitive and filter out students who do not have the capacity and understanding to do well further. But it is still at an undergraduate level. Many of them go abroad for higher education. Mostly students from other institutions go to IIT`s for advanced degress and eventually go abroad too.
Hence even though B.S. level education is good, M.S., Ph.D. level needs improvement.

Regarding GRE tests, having subject wise would be better. Many of the science disciplines admit students with a general test, which doesn`t relate tot he students knowledge about the specific subject but only Analytical, verbal and Quantitative skills. And there is no correlation b/t GRE scores (general) and a persons knowledge about the subject.

Re: # 4

I never had a lot of exposure in higher learning in india. i left the country after B.S. In u.s. where the prof has to work hard/smart and receive grants to get tenure, in india i don`t think there is any tenure system. Once hired you stay in the college. Prof in my colleges got a decent salary, no job pressure, no research, just teaching and lab even though some of them had Ph.D`S with 10-15 yrs of teaching exp. In premier institutes like the iit, iim, iisc, may be the prestige of being a prof. also plays some role, with some research activity going on. the iits are autonomus and fought severly to maintian it. may be that it gives more control over policies and doesn`t frustate the profs/administrators.
Do you see paucity of profs in some institute or is it prevalent throughout the country? are these people going to the private sector or leaving the country? I think just having good salary is not the only motivating factor to keep a good prof. Some value the surroundng atmosphere like individual thinking, encouragement in research, career prospects. It could be a sum of all these.

Just a few days back, almost 100 PhD Students arrived here in France. They are all sponsored by HEC for a duration of four years on 1200 dollars/month.

That means: 1200 x 12x 4 = 57600 dollars per person + Charges for admission (consultants dealing with HEC for that) and lab facilities etc.

Next year, number of PhD scholarships are planned to be more than 150. All of these people have filled a bond that they will return to Pakistan and serve there for five years atleast. (Many of them are faculty members from Pakistani Universities).

In other countries also, HEC is managing similar programs.

Now Imagining that, 50 % of these people will return back after their studies. Morally, 100 % should return as a poor governmet is spending so much on them. And 50 % of returning PhDs learn something positive from the work going on in western world, I am optimist enough to see some positive changes in our universities in near future.

Dr Hoodbhoy has really described a bad situation in Pakistani universities. He is right to an extent. But reading through his article, one can easily judge that he is being an idealist. While being an idealist is a good thing, it is certainly not good to be a pessimistic person after realizing that things are not ideal. (I remember, he visited India sometime back, wrote an article over some negative aspects of Indian universities and Indians on the forum were angry how he dared to object the system there.)

In 98, when I entered the university, I never listened of MoST and HEC. None of my seniors knew about the scholarships for higher studies. Now, since Dr Atta`s times, it is very easy to arrange money for higher studies. I accept that so many Toms, Dicks and Harrys are getting chances for higher studies but I also know that there are many intelligent people also getting benefit of this money. Certainly, situation is much better than it was before 1999. Although, I accept that this money can be used more intellligently.

And I am shocked to see that South Asia Tribune is using Dr Sahib`s articles to prove that government is being corrupt in Education sector. As a matter of fact, HEC is not corrupt. It is less efficient (according to Dr Sahib`s Standards). But it is more efficient than any other government organization in Pakistan.

Re: # 3 Charlie, OK, send more abroad, import as much uptodate knowledge as you can, that`s the order of the day in most developing countries... I am not against that, but I am sure, if you are impartial, you can count on fingers the number of students amongst these 150 who really deserved that. Majority of such students are there coz of HEC`s bias and favour towards them or their supervisors, or their institute. Within the last single year, I have seen dozen students arriving in Europe for PhDs in chemistry, on one of the scholarship programs of the HEC, most of them are from HEJ....and I think you can figure out well why they have to be in Chemistry or from HEJ!
And it`s not about academic excellence, we all know, at least we two after 14-16 years of education there, how the system works in Pakistani borads of education and Universities, rather it`s more a matter of intelligence, competence and intellectual approach...which is not even considered in any of the local `selection procedures`. Also, do you think a Masters degree holder from PU or QAU can compete with a graduate from a European country, in terms of knowledge?...not even by 10%! Reforms need to brought about at the lower level first...then we can perceive of any advancement at the higher level.

Re: # 19

Shobig! I fear that we have serious differences of opinion here. Let`s start one by one.

Shobg Said: I am not against that, but I am sure, if you are impartial, you can count on fingers the number of students amongst these 150 who really deserved that.

Reply: Trying to be fully impartial, I tell you that there are so many good studens among HEC scholarship holders. Looking at the performance o last year HEC scholars, I can tell you many of them topped their universities. I am always happy to see performance of those guys. Some of them are coming from even very lowly ranked universities in Pakistan. In some courses having less amoun of mahematics, they don`t feel any difficulty adjusting themselves. In the mathematics based courses, they face difficult times but with 3/4 months, they come on the right track. One of my batch mate who topped at an MS program in Imperial College, his proessor told him that Souh Asians are very bad at mathematics. and he gave an example of an IIT topper how he struggled for good grades in mathematics based subjects.

HEC Doesn`t have any magical stick with which can they put more talent in Pakisanis. For faculty training programs, they select faculty members. In open schemes, there is a nationwide competiton. Who wins, ges the scholarship. Out of the studens coming on HEC scholarship, most of hem belong to middle class/lower middle class proving that HEC programs are quie fair. Now i there is any person who considers himself more talented, he should come up and compete with others.

HEC is not the only scholarship left in the country. If you are good enough, you have good grades, goid GRE scors, ask some reputed professor for good recomendation. Voila! You get admission in any good university in the world. Nobody can stop the real talent from being recognised. Losers alwaysz complain, talk of unfair play.

Shobig Said : Majority of such students are there coz of HEC`s bias and favour towards them or their supervisors, or their institute.

Reply : Nops. Open tests are held for HEC schlarship open scheme. SUPARCO, NDC, KRL etc send their employees on their own expenses. If HEJ has more students studying abroad, it might be because of good standard o the institutre. Atta Ur Rehman is one of the best scientists in chemistry in the world. Being editor of almost dozen internaional journals, publishing 600 papers, getting so many awrads for his scientific contributions, the guys recommendations work. Let`s suppose i he recommends top 5 students from HEJ, do you think there are any chances for those students being rejected.


Shobig Said: we all know, at least we two after 14-16 years of education there, how the system works in Pakistani borads of education and Universities, rather it`s more a matter of intelligence, competence and intellectual approach...which is not even considered in any of the local `selection procedures`. Also, do you think a Masters degree holder from PU or QAU can compete with a graduate from a European country, in terms of knowledge?...not even by 10%! Reforms need to brought about at the lower level first...then we can perceive of any advancement at the higher level.

Reply: Graduate programs in our universities are weak because best of the students from undergrduate courses opt for studies abroad. In an MS program at UET, I saw so many students being enrolled. Before the start of second semester, session was reduced to half students because rest of them found admissions in western universities and quit MS program in Pakistan. Everybody knows Brand Names work well in Pakistan. A very good graduate student from Pakistani universiy and a bad graduate from western university, people prefer bad graduate from farangi world because of the brand name. In this situation, who is silly enough to take admission in a grad program in Pakistan.

In my honest opinion, excellent MS level program can be managed in Pakistan. In so many fields, we don`t need a lot of money for sudies and research. Many fields in the research need good brains, and a cheap computer, access to research material o research journals/socities, facility to print as many articles as one wants, a pencil and few pages, a few simulation softwares (and industry is always willing to give their tools to researchers at very cheap prices if assured that serious research work is being done). In Pakistan, it is not really difficult to have all these. Only thing that the grad students need more is the assurance that if they are technically good, their abilities will be recognized properly. but it will not hapen easily. Pakistanis have some complexes with them. Some of them deliberately want to keep the status quo working, others are impressed with Mc Donald universitiues. Nobody will be willing to accept that students from a local university can study well.

I am soirry, I am toitally offtopic. I have a lot to say about the original topic being discussed. I will write on it laters.

Re: # 24 Well, about HEJ, I quoted more or less, the words of a person who has recently arrived at the same university as I am, on an HEC scholarship, from HEJ! No one, but him, can know better what goes on undercover. According to him HEJ is, `officially` a preferable institute for scholarships, because every student enrolled there has to take up a subjective GRE test(local). Now is this fair by any means, that a local course, and Dr Hoodbhoy`s has unvieled well the `authenticity` of this local GRE well here, be only commenced at one institute...isn`t it akin to deliberately giving the students of that very institute an upper hand over the others? That is the reason that more more Chemistry students have made it to the UK universites this year than all the other desciplines combined! Is it really that difficulat for Dr Atta to introduce such a program at other research institutes also?
Also, as for as the personal accomplishments of Dr Atta are concerned, no doubt both him and Dr hoodbhoy stand out among the top scientists in south Asia, but that does not mean he is a good policy-maker too...and his personas is free of all sorts of corruption? After all he`s been brought up in the same system, and is bound to keep up with it.
lastly for now....we need to be idealists to get out of this quagmire of incompetence and discredit.
more later...
best

Re: # 24

Oh So many typos. ``T`` key of my keyboard is not working well plus I didn`t read once again to press ``Submit``. I hope everything will be understandable.

I agree with all the statements that he said and want to add that what will happen when we will be getting this much ``PhD`` every year. What they all be doing?
In computers a term GIGO is used means ``Garbege In Gargabe Out``. I think something like this is happening. A ``supervisor`` like this will produce ``future supervisors`` all have the same problems.
Moreover Pakistan does not have faculty in fields like Computer Science. So PhD in such fields from a local university is a complete waste of time and money.

Great article. I couldn`t agree more with your sentiments. It`s no wonder that many of the young `brains` in our country are going abroad to places like America, Canada, Europe and even East Asia (e.g. Singapore) for a higher education which has value and potential. Many of them won`t return since intellectual integrity and creativity aren`t fostered in our country to the extent they are in other places.

// fahd