EDUCATION-PAKISTAN: Liberalisation Drive Raises Teachers’ Ire

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nadeem Iqbal

ISLAMABAD, Oct 24 2002 (IPS) - Thousands of teachers throughout Pakistan have been taking to the streets this month to protest against government proposals to bring the private sector into tertiary education and boost enrolment numbers.

Protesting teachers say the proposed changes, being pursued under reforms pushed by the World Bank (WB) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), will lead to fee increases for tertiary students at publicly funded institutes, and will make getting a university degree or a college certificate virtually impossible for the nation’s poor.

The liberalisation of Pakistan’s tertiary education would also see publicly run universities for the first time operate on a user pays basis.

In these reforms, the newly established Higher Education Commission (HEC) faces the challenge of ensuring that they do not adversely affect the public’s access to education.

Raja Mahboob Hussain, a member of the teachers’ group Joint Action Committee (JAC), says that pushing up education costs would in effect deprive a majority of people of their right to education.

Of Pakistan’s 143 million total population, less than three percent of 17 to 23 year-olds are enrolled in tertiary education.

But demand for higher education is actually climbing, except that there is not enough access to it, the government says.

”Over the years tertiary enrolment is much faster than the numerical increase in the institutions,” reads the government’s national education policy.

”As a result, there is limited access to higher education and many of the prospective students who are unable to get admission are forced to join unrecognised institutions or give up their pursuit of higher education,” it adds.

Thus, the government of President Gen Pervez Musharraf is pursuing an education plan to be implemented with the help of the private sector, one that officials say will boost enrolment at the tertiary level, improve the quality and education and remove the need for Pakistani students to go overseas for higher studies.

Pakistan has 789 professional colleges and 68 universities, and the government plans to have them increase by 15 to 40 percent in the next eight years.

By doing this, the government hopes to double to 200,000 the number of students enrolled in higher learning institutes by 2004, up from 100,000 at present.

The proposed reforms would also give the private sector interests in the management of public sector educational institutions, in order to boost efficiency.

But to Hussain, this is nothing short of the establishment of universities ”run by looters in the guise of boards of governors”.

The inclusion of non-teachers and traders in university management boards would degrade educational institutes to the level of ”markets and departmental stores,” he argues.

Affecting the country’s 40,000 tertiary-level teachers more directly are proposals to replace the post of lecturers with teaching associates, who would be hired at market rates and on contracts with promotions tied to professional qualifications.

The reforms would do away with the seniority system currently in place.

Outraged, teachers earlier this month rejected the policy of hiring teaching staff on contract, saying it would only serve to generate insecurity among the teaching staff.

It is no surprise then that teachers have been at the centre of protest rallies in most major cities across the country for the past six months.

Many students have also been joining the protests, because of the fears that giving the private sector a role in public education would lead to increased university fees.

Currently, publicly run institutes charge a 25 U.S.-dollar fee per student annually, way below the autonomous institutes’ 400 dollar tuition fees and private institutes’ 4,000 dollar fee a year.

Professor Nazim Hussain, who is opposed to the reforms, says the government should already have learned lessons from the past. After some tertiary institutions obtained greater autonomy in 1989, they began charging their students significantly higher fees.

But in its defence, the Musharraf government says it plans to inject around 100 million U.S. dollars annually into tertiary education, and to see allocations to the tertiary education budget rising from 0.39 percent to one percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2004.

But critics say this will not go far enough to meet the expansion plans for the sector, which include establishing new universities in underdeveloped regions of the country.

Instead of courting the private sector for much-needed funds, teachers and students are demanding that the government increase its overall spending for education, from the current 2.5 percent of GDP to at least six percent.

Proponents of the market-oriented approach however argue that if Pakistan is to stem the flow of students going abroad every year to continue their education, it has to develop its own world-class centres of higher learning with the aid of the private sector.

Amid the debate on education reforms, HEC chief and Education Minister Professor Atta-ur-Rehman said that no student would be denied admission to a public university or college due to higher fees.

The nation’s teachers are far more sceptical though, saying they will boycott classes every Monday and Thursday until the government withdraws the controversial aspects of the education reforms.

EDUCATION-PAKISTAN: Liberalisation Drive Raises Teachers’ Ire

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nadeem Iqbal

ISLAMABAD, Oct 24 2002 (IPS) - Thousands of teachers throughout Pakistan have been taking to the streets this month to protest against government proposals to bring the private sector into tertiary education and boost enrolment numbers.
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