Moving Beyond Talk: A Roadmap for Quality Education

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Then there is this joker of a woman; Dr. Shireen Mazari``. Apparantly she heads some institute that looks after, and justifies the Pakistan Army/Rightwing agenda. She is shrill, vociferous, argumentative, and a liar; highly desirable traits, especially to prop up the present regime of Mr. Mush. She is expert in twisting the facts to please Musharraf (god knows where both of them would end-up after the Dems recover the Whitehouse?). In the article published in ``Nation``, she is lamenting the audacity of Nayyar report on the state of education (ha!) in Pakistan.
http://www.jang-group.com/thenews/mar2004-daily/10-03-2004/oped/o3.htm
It seems that Prof Nayyar has stepped on her tail. she has been coming out and swinging like a ``Cheap Ladakoo Bazari Laundiya``. I doubt whether she reads the garbage that is being spewed out by her. She is definitely in need of a thorough colonoscopy to check her brain functions.
I have ``googled`` her name and have come across the the lies she is spreading, her hatered for democratic values, compassion toward humanity in general; and poor Pakistanis in particular. She wants to keep the madrassah curriculum intact -may be she is on the take of petrodollars, may be she is in cahoots with Usama, Al Qayda, and Taleban. What ever it is, she is bad for Pakistan.
Dont you all agree?

Hey, Maasanamuthu:

It is really, really rich to see you giving advice about quality education. I mean, here you are with a degree obtained from some no-name third-rate college in India and that too by cheating deserving candidates out of their slot by producing a false caste certificate declaring you to be an OBC, repeatedly flunking any course that requires any analytical aptitude, passing by bribing the examiners, and getting a job during the boom years and kissing your manager`s arse to find your way to the US.

You wouldn`t know the meaning of quality education if it bit you on the ankle.

Do tell us the names of research publications to your credit.

At least, tell us what distinguished your alma mater, except for the fact that it offered courses in Dravidian Studies including the writings of The Great Intellectual.

Mr. Isphahani, I appreciate your comment. Achievements of UK and other developed world in education and enomic areas are great inspiration for people in the developing nations - they help demonstrate what can be achieved by righly focused human energy and efforts.

At the same time, their 100% literacy and tall building were not achieved in a single day and sometimes, we tend to ignore their journey which brought them to this point of inspiring success. And it is in the journey that lessons exisit for nations like ours (both india and pakistan). I am sure there was a time when nothing existed even in Uk and their conditions matched ours. What is important is to learn from how they achieved it.

Pakistani universities face a number of very fundamental management problems. They fail to deliver an environment where even half decent faculty would like to stay and teach. The problems are obvious and easy to solve. However, what is not understood is why there has been no cencern to solve them and no systematic effort to this end.

What we lack is not infrastructure. What we lack is also not very clear because we do not have any systematic management going on where we can make credible assessments of what is needed. Building are the last thing that I would recommend. What we have presently remains largely underutilised. Students flock to Uk or US universities for good reasons.

What I am recommending is that we optimize our systems so they are ready to absorb injections of further financial investments inthis sector. We need to start fixingour act. I am afraid that our current human resource which is available at these universities is mostly unsuited for the jobs. Why I say this is that the conditions are not conducive for self respecting people to work here - so anybody and everybody who could find a job in US or europe or canada has foundone. Others who could not leave for one reason or the other inspite of potential (and there are many) have lost hope and do not feel motivated. And no one cares. Performance is not even an issue here. The corporate culture at universities cannot handle and is ill prepared to accomodate highly talented people. So tangible and intangible attributes of our universities are unsuited for attraction, retention and development of world class faculty. hence developing internaitnally comparable university is nothing more than a dream - thats what we are chasing.

This is not the environment in which universities can improve and they will not improve regardless of how much money goes into them. We need to overhaul educaitnal management and organiatinal systems and culture. It will be difficult to do with the people who are a part of this system at this time and who have helped perpetuate it all.

What ever is flowing into higher education at this time is not delivering a proportionate value. We need to fix things. ANd the article above proposes a fraework to do that.

tayyab

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From what I gather, A world class university - more than anything else - is the most compelling place to teach. A university which can be positioned as the most compelling place to teach will become the most compelling place to learn and to invest in. Hence world class students and lots and lots of funds will follow.

Teaching is the core business of a university. Universities exist to enable teaching, learning and thinking. All other functions and work processes, policies, procedures and everything else should be geared to the end of building an attractive destination for these activities.

How people do that is no secret. Why we are not trying to achieve this level of organizaitoonal efficiecny and effectiveness is a mystry.

Quality of educaiton does not lie in the curriculum design etc. What harvard teaches is available on the web. But surprisingly, there is only one harvard.

Our efforts t do quality higher educaiton are beating about the wrong bush.

This is what I gathered from my interactions with you who spared time to participate in this discussioon.

Thank you
tayyab rashid

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soysauce, attracting worl class talent is the key to building world class univeristy. However, funds alone are not the determinant of where talent goes. Financial and general management systems in pakistani universities are not yet at a level where a credible statement can be made about the financial capacity of pakistani universities. And if education holds the key to a nations well being, i am pretty sure Pakistan has the resources to pay up and meet internatinal benchmarks on faculty salaries. The only obstacle is the will and guts to divert resources to where they matter most - educaiton.

At the same time, my concern is that since our universities are not well managed, they are not prepared to handle top brain (even if money can be arranged). To my mind, talent needs a certain environment to be productive. The entire HR of our universities needs serious retraining and retooling their skill sets to meet the requirements of the people we are vying for.

Thus a need to fix university work processes and upgrade people. I have a very strong feeling that if appropriate environment can be created, attracting top class teachers shuld not be a big deal.

Thats why the proposal presented in the above article presents a framework to overhaul our higher eduaitonal institutions and to build work processes which have build in mehcanism for continuous improvement and innovation. that will create an atmosphere conducive for excellence in hgiher educaiotn in Pakistan.

Right now, most of these places fail to deliver on basics. They cannot ensure clean washrooms. Higher educational quality is like foreign language to them. So there is no question of attracting top class faculty or students - no matter how much you pay them.

Dialogue,
If you look at the universities in the US, the top ones hire talent by offering huge incentives, monetary and non-monetary. Sometimes the 2nd level universities can beat the top ones by hiring away talented faculty by offering huge sums of money. These sorts of games cannot be played by universities in poor countries where money doesn`t ``grow on trees``. Therefore comparisons to western universities is not very productive. If you look at what NUS, singapore has done, is to attract talent from wherever, again by offering good facilities and globally competitive salaries. They have improved their quality (as measured by placement of their graduates, research output, ranking by 3rd party, etc) drastically in the span of 2 decades. But that`s singapore, an affluent state, concentrating its resources mainly on a single institution. I`m not sure that`s a good model either.
You have your own Aga Khan university that has quite a name recognition, from what I understand. There`s also an informal measurement system by which a certain prestige gets attached to a university or college. This measure is based on the accomplishment of the graduates, where the smart students like to go, reputation of the teachers, etc. For semiquantitative measure that may or may not be reliable, but one which attracts a lot of attention, check out the US News & World Report`s ranking of universities & colleges in the US. Their methodology is controversial (which isn`t?) but their rankings are religiously trumpted by the top-ranked colleges themselves.

#30 by soysauce : What I understand from your post is that quality of education of a university is a reflection of the success it achieved in attracting top of the line people to teach and learn at its campus. Can we say then that ``Attraction, development and retention of talent and ofcourse funds`` form the foundation for the performance of a university?

This makes sense in that the core business of a university is teaching and learning. And graduates who pass out is a reflection of the quality of this process.

The next logical question is what is the look and feel of the university that can attract talent. There is a cultural aspect to it, an aesthetic apect, and work process efficiency and infrstructural aspects.

If teaching and leanring are core processes at a university, then every other work process shoul dbe geared to the task of facilitating the core activities. This is what should direct action at all support functions and their performance shoul dbe measured on this.

Pakistani universities can fix their act and improve tremendously. Are there any people who can comment on what they think are the nuisances which are keeping the brightest of this nation away from the campuses - why don`t more people come back from USA or europe or elsewhere and rally to teach at Pakistani universities?


Mr. Isphahani, what do you think...

#30 by soysauce ``I am not sure these are good examples for poor countries. ``

I would differ with this because University Leaders in Pakistan and about everybody else has used this as an excuse to perform. Let me just say that Pakistan is not exactly a poor country. It is a mismanaged country with plenty of inefficient and ineffective institutions and plenty of people (about 150 million) who continue to tolerate.

Rs 5,229.670 million rupees were allocated for all federally funded universities in 2003-2004. If you compare this with some other budgetary heads, this is peanuts. But If you compare the allocation with results delivered, the performance of our universities is dismal to put it lightly.

Also, universities can attract funds from alumni and corporate sector if they are percieved as adding value and I am sure money is available for the asking. But it is only the state funds and tuition fees from poor students (in pakistan parents pay tuitions), that can be swindled and no performance or quality is necessary. universities are not prepared to bringin the corporate sector because that will openthem up and make these places more transparent - something that the exisiting people at these universities will not like.

I will straight away agree with your ``You could say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and measure the quality of higher education by what the graduates of an institution end up doing.`` But who is measuring in Pakistan. Although this is one of the ultimate measures of effectiveness of a university, you will be surprised to hear that very very few universities might have a mechanism for collecting/reporting this data. Not that it is difficult to measure. not much is getting measured here.

How do they get away without any objective measures of their performance is a mystery.

Performance measurement parameters can and will always be contested. But it does not mean we should not be measuring.

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#31
Sorry I have trouble parsing much of what you have written. Are you saying Harvard is a bad school because of Benazir?
It`s not a question what some individuals do. Dialogue brought up MIT as an example of excellence in technical education. MIT alumni are professors at engineering departments all over the US. Similarly, Stanford engineering graduates go on to become great enterpreneurs and professors and what not. Were it not for this fact, Stanford would be another runofthemill university.

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Dialogue,
You could say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and measure the quality of higher education by what the graduates of an institution end up doing. This too is somewhat misleading because once an institution achieves a certain level of ``quality`` it will attract better students who are more likely to succeed even if the quality of education is not up to par. The process becomes autocatalytic with more students succeeding which in turns leads to better funding, etc. Perhaps the goal should be to get the standard up to that level where things could run automatically. A world class university attracts the brightest students and faculty and lots & lots of money. But there also are many very fine liberal arts colleges in the US which are expensive, have rich alumni and huge endowments and impart excellent education. But without large amounts money they also would starve to death. I am not sure these are good examples for poor countries.