Headline Nov 20, 2015/ "'SHOOTING FOR : !WORLD CLASS UNIVERSITIES! "'

"'SHOOTING FOR : 

!WORLD CLASS UNIVERSITIES! "'

THE QUANTITY OF STUDENTS does not matter..........

CalTech at Pasadena, ranks number one in the  The World University Rankings for the fifth consecutive year. 

CalTech is very small with only  2,200 students but with top notch faculty  -300 in number. Including five Nobel Laureates, and is the recipient  of  57 US National Medal of Science and  32  Nobel Laureates from among its faculty and alumni.

IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD , say, Pakistan, -the first historic and temporary host'  of !WOW!, the race to establish world-class universities and raise the level of existing universities is on:  

This is how the former chairman of the Higher Education Commission [HEC] recalls the basic attempts and lessons in his own words: 

''My emphasis was to improve the quality of teaching and research by increasing the impact of  Quality Enhancement Cells, the number of PhD faculty, the ratio of 

to non PhD faculty, the number of PhD scholars, research funding, and the number of quality research publications.

We introduced for the first time the  Institutional Performance Evaluation  through which universities could identify their weaknesses, and build upon their strengths for an enhanced reputation.

The HEC's emphasis now is on increasing the number of students in each university instead of improving quality.

To shoot for the stars, we must double the number of  'quality'  PhD faculty in each university rather than doubling the number of students or universities. 

Our PhD scholars should be sent only to the top 100 universities of the world rather than to lesser known universities.

We had agreements with a number of top ranked universities in the US where scholars were paying marginal tuition, and in case of top European and Asian universities, no tuition at all.

Only when we have top-notch PhD's returning back to teach and conduct research in our universities will we reap what we have sowed.    

The quality of graduates or publications coming out of Pakistan is not improving our country's reputation," writes the author Dr. Javaid Leghari." 

There are thousands of graduates with paper degrees- *Not worth the piece they are printed on, further adding to unemployment*. 

Increasing quantity will only add to the miseries of the graduating students*.

We have PhD scholars who can hardly teach or conduct quality research, as they  have not been exposed to the best. Our junior PhD faculty coming out of lesser ranked universities should be sent to the top 100 universities of the world for at least six months to do post-doc research.

This will also create new partnerships with top-ranked universities as well as add to the reputation.

Research funding must be at least doubled, and a policy introduced by the government that every ministry must allocate a portion of its budget to fund university research, through properly constituted committees headed by distinguished faculty.

When I  served as a tenured full professor of engineering at SUNY Buffalo, we were able to acquire over $40 million in competitive research funding from multiple sources: Nasa, DOD, NSF, private industry and the state to establish the first Space Power Consortium in the US.

Herb Hauptmann, a co-researchers in mathematics working on molecular modelling received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995.

For Pakistan, the race to develop and establish world-class universities is on. It is against these odds that Pakistan needs to strategise its higher education policies to enable it to regain its lost reputation and to become among the best in the world.''

With respectful dedication to all the Leaders of the World. See Ya all Your Excellencies on !WOW!  -the World Students Society:

''' Showing The Way '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless