The future of higher education in our beloved country is once again under threat. In this era of technology expansion, when all the developed and developing countries of the world are paying special attention to better possibilities and results by increasing investment in the field of higher education.

It is in no way appropriate that the ongoing budget of the current financial year 2024-25 has been reduced from Rs 65 billion to a low level of Rs 25 billion. On the other hand, it was restricted only to federal universities. In this regard, the Ministry of Finance has also written a letter to the Higher Education Commission, which had requested 126 billion rupees for more than 160 government universities of the country.  Another blow to the Higher Education Commission is that the Planning Commission has reduced the development budget of the Higher Education Commission from Rs 59 billion to Rs 21 billion.  Institutions of higher education are islands of knowledge and awareness from which young graduates in various fields expose themselves to new trends in every sector including economy, industry, medicine, agriculture and corporate sector and create opportunities for development and possibilities. These institutions need to be put on financial footing while avoiding compromise on high academic standards and research work.  In a country like Pakistan, where all the opportunities of higher education abroad are available for the elite, the education and training of the deserving youth with less resources and the development and prosperity of the country are the responsibilities of the institutions of higher education established in the country, whose educational and research quality and developmental needs should not be overlooked in any way. 

On the other hand, we should not hesitate to seek support from friendly countries for reform and improvement in many fields, including the education system. Due to financial constraints our universities could not update its merit standards. Choosing the best university is the dream of every hard-working and intelligent student, which gives him pride and bright prospects for a prosperous future.  In the globalized era, a good university refers to an institution that is considered secure in global rankings. In the list of 400 universities issued by a well-known international organization recently, only one institution of Pakistan, Quaid-e-Azam University, managed to make its place, where its number is 315, while talking about 600 universities, among them, National University of Science and Technology (NUST) and a private university in Lahore.  According to the list, the 10 best universities in the world include one in the United States, two in the United Kingdom, two more in the United States, one in the United Kingdom, one in Switzerland, one in Singapore, one in the United Kingdom and one in the United States.  The total number of universities in Pakistan is 237, of which 141 are in the public sector and 96 are in the private sector. It is not the first time that Pakistan's name in the world ranking comes after barely 300 ranks, although it was kept in mind while establishing the Higher Education Commission that Pakistan will also be able to make its place in the world ranking for which BS program is four years and MS two years basis. were started.  Although HEC had set strict rules to keep the quality of education and research high, one of them was to increase the number of scholarships abroad to get good faculty, but the tendency of graduates not to return increased and the domestic rate of good faculty in universities was limited to a few percent.  The development of the country is very much dependent on the higher education sector, if it is not given proper attention, then the efforts made so far for its development will prove useless.

As a matter of fact, it is time to prioritize education sector. The education sector has never been short of challenges in our country, but right now it is faced with huge crisis due to lack of funds  at almost every level due to economic crisis that has badly impacted almost every sector. Though the current government has been promising remedial steps for bringing education back on track, but on the ground there seem to be no steps intact which can help revive the fortunes of the education sector across the country. It is not a good omen that in coming budget, less funds are reported to be allocated for the ongoing and new schemes of the Higher Education Commission under the Public Sector Development Programme. The education losses since the Corona pandemics have reached an alarming level and now the unprecedented economic crisis has also caused a dent to the field. The higher education has suffered the most during and after this period as it was already a subject of neglect on part of the successive Federal governments. Right now the HEC has been faced with multiple problems, the foremost being the lack of funds. The current government had promised an increase in HEC budget but that is not a reality and now  the universities that are facing the dilemma of coping with their rising expenses including the 15 to 20 increases in salaries of the employees and staff. The Single National Curriculum issue is also persisting and it needs a lot of work on part of the government to redress the apprehensions of parents and other stakeholders. The previous government of PTI willfully neglected and ignored the issues raised by parents and provinces with regard to the SNC but time has come the current government must remove those issues before further educational losses occur.

As a matter of fact, it is a serious issues and educationists think that it will require a lot of time and deliberations to  removes  the controversial contents from the curriculum to set things right on the education front which is on the receiving end for decades under the successive governments. Not only the higher education, the school education is also in doldrums and the Annual Status of Education Report Punjab Rural 2021 showed that ratio of out-of-school children  has risen to alarming 14%, up by almost 5% from the 2019 statistics.  The out-of-school-children dilemma is also alarming. The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), are three million out-of-school children in the country, particularly the rural areas. The education sector has never been short of challenges in our country, but right now it is faced with huge crisis due to lack of funds  at almost every level due to economic crisis that has badly impacted almost every sector.