Saturday, March 1, 2014

Recommendations for Higher Education Policy in KPK


PTI has kicked off skill development program and knowledge city projects in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa per its manifesto. However, IMHO, these approaches will not provide a long term solution for the dire lack of skilled workforce in the province. The reasons being that:
- While gaining some technical skill is important to make a living, it is not enough to compete with the world, and its important to acquire deeper knowledge - and likewise, build a stronger knowledge base. 
- Building Knowledge City (KC) is a good initiative, but the limitation will be that the people of far flung areas will find it prohibitively expensive to afford the boarding and lodging costs - in addition to the tuition fees for KC universities. 

Also, we cannot wait for primary and secondary education problems to be solved before starting work on higher education. We need to work in parallel on higher education, have a long-term plan in place, and start executing on it.

We need a wholistic, comprehensive, long term policy for taking higher education forward - and help us reach where we want to be in a reasonable time frame. And, I was unable to find one on KPK Govt official pages, on Higher Education Department Pages and on PTI website (insaf.pk).

In order to fill in this gap, I've put together a draft of recommendations for taking higher education forward. Feel free to comment on it and let us know what can be done better. Here is the link for the document 

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