Due to weak planning, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) Islamabad has so for remained unsuccessful to achieve the desired results of the US-Pak knowledge corridor programme that was launched with the aim to produce more PhDs to fill the gap of PhD scholars’ deficiency in the country through dispensing scholarship.
According to the information available with Daily Times, the HEC could send only 100 candidates to the United States for seeking PhD education on scholarship in different disciplines in the first year of the project against a set target of 300 students in that year.
While explaining basic cause behind this failure, a senior official of the HEC privy to all affairs of the project, said on the condition of anonymity that on the time of devising PC-I for this project the commission did not include the tuition fee of the students as part of scholarship.
“How it was possible for a student to pay tuition fee from his/her own pocket”, he questioned adding that apart from other minor flaws , this was a major reason for failure to achieve set goals in the first year of the project.
He said that the HEC had decided to pay only stipends of 1 million US dollars to each successful candidate for the scholarship under this programme. The official explained that it is rare that any university in US agrees to pay tuition fee of any student. “Usually, US varsities do fund tuition fee to only those students who bagged extraordinary grade in their previous academic careers”, he said.
According to the HEC, there is shortage of 38000 PhDs in the country. In view of this huge deficiency, the then government in 2016 had planned to produce 10,000 through scholarship programme in various universities of the US universities in next ten years under US-Pakistan Knowledge corridor programme.
The documents stated that the first Phase of the project was approved in 2017 which comprised on three year timeframe while in this span of time 1500 scholarships would have to provide with 500 on annual basis. The sources disclose that the HEC failed to send 500 scholars in US even in first year of the Phase-I of this mega project as per plan.
According to the available information, in June 2015 the US and Pakistan established an Education, Science and Technology Working Group (ESTWG) under the Bilateral Strategic Dialogue. During the official visit of then Prime Minister Nawaz Shairf to meet with US President Obama and other US officials it was discussed the proposal to establish US-Pakistan Knowledge Corridor and developed human capital envisioned in Pakistan’s policy document Vision 2025.
The second meeting of the ESTWG was held in 2016 in Washington DC to develop a joint action plan for making operational the US-Pakistan Knowledge Corridor. The US agreed to Pakistan to jointly increasing the number of Pakistani faculty who obtain their PhD in the US universities.
When Daily Times approached HEC media wing to seek information achieved goals and yielded outputs of the project, the commission, instead of giving some solid appropriate response regarding the subject, shared overall positive objectives of the project which had been planned in 2015 and also available on HEC official website.
It claimed “during the first phase, HEC is focusing on sending 1500 PhD scholars to the leading US universities starting from Fall-2017. For this purpose, HEC has been directly negotiating agreements with top US Universities, for exploring the possibility of placement of Pakistani cohorts.
The HEC said “the project extends guidance to potential Pakistani candidates – intending to seek admission in PhD studies at US Universities- through provision of rigorous GRE/GMAT/TOEFL trainings throughout the country”.
It further maintained that HEC is also exploring the possibility of adoption of virtual technology based trainings to facilitate learning of the candidates at their own pace. For provision of such trainings and award of scholarship, HEC considers candidates with excellent credentials.
