A Brief Review of the Literature on HEC and Higher Education in Pakistan

Henna Ahsan
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Henna Ahsan: Pakistan Institute of Development Economics

No 2025:1, PIDE-Working Papers from Pakistan Institute of Development Economics

Abstract: There is no debate that higher education has an important role in enhancing productivity at individual and national level. Owing to this importance higher education expansion appeared as a major societal change of 20th century. Pakistan following the suit converted its institute dealing with higher education i.e. University Grant Commission (UGC) in 2002 to HEC Higher Education Commission (HEC) to step ahead in making higher education`s access easy for a large number of people. Therefore, this study reviews in detail the reforms taken so far by HEC to advance the purpose of its creation and what impact it had on quality and demand of higher education and does this higher education materialise itself in the form of earnings and returns for the individuals. So, for this purpose, we reviewed the most relevant studies that have brought to light the aforementioned issues and have tried to summarise these studies` most critical findings. For presenting a clearer picture of the scenario we also estimated some facts and figures from latest datasets pertaining to Pakistan and also from crosscountry analysis. The overall finding shows that although HEC has introduced many reforms to improve the quality of higher education, however due to budget constraint and many other hurdles, it could not achieve its objective up to the desired level. Moreover, regarding the impact of higher education expansion on employment opportunities it is observed that unemployment of higher education has reached 18 percent and over education is 40 percent according to LFS 2020-21. Although, returns to education are high, as highly educated people crowd out low educated, however when we compare returns across the cohorts, we see that these have declined as young, educated cohorts are getting low returns compared to their older cohorts. One of the reasons for these low returns could be the stagnant demand of highly educated people and second the lack of skills which are required by the labour market. Therefore, this literature review concludes that without developing the labour market and without improving the quality of higher education, further investment in higher education expansion would be a waste of public and private resources.

Pages: 41
Date: 2025
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