Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir — Economist & Financial Analyst | Dubai, UAE

The Pakistan Ledger | Opinion

Pakistani governments of every political stripe have, at some point in their tenure, expressed the aspiration to build a knowledge economy. The phrase appears in vision documents, budget speeches, policy frameworks, and press conferences with a frequency that bears no relationship to the fiscal commitment that a knowledge economy requires. A knowledge economy needs an educated, skilled, continuously learning workforce. Building that workforce requires sustained, substantial, multi-decade investment in education at every level — from early childhood development through university research. Pakistan’s public education expenditure — approximately 1.7–2% of GDP across recent years — is not a foundation for a knowledge economy. It is barely adequate for basic literacy, and Pakistan has not even achieved that. The mathematics of the aspiration versus the investment do not work. They do not come close.

The ASER Learning Outcomes — What Pakistani Children Are Actually Learning

The Annual Status of Education Report — ASER Pakistan — conducts annual household surveys of learning outcomes among children of school age. The findings, consistent across years of data collection, are educationally alarming. Significant proportions of children who have completed multiple years of schooling cannot read a simple Urdu or English sentence. Foundational numeracy — basic arithmetic — eludes large percentages of children in government primary schools across multiple provinces. The learning crisis in Pakistan is not a crisis of school access alone. It is a crisis of school quality — of what children are actually learning during the years they spend in classrooms.

Government school teacher absenteeism, documented in multiple provincial surveys, runs at rates that would be considered scandalous in any comparable educational system. Curriculum relevance — the alignment between what is taught in Pakistan’s government school curriculum and what children need to learn for productive economic participation — is a subject of ongoing debate that has not produced comprehensive curriculum reform at provincial level. And the physical infrastructure of government schools — particularly in rural areas and in urban peripheral settlements — remains inadequate to the basic dignity that families expect of their children’s learning environment.

The Public-Private Divide — What It Reveals

The rapid growth of private schooling in Pakistan — from low-fee private schools in rural areas to elite English-medium institutions in urban centres — is a market response to government school quality failure. Pakistani families across the income spectrum, when they can afford any alternative to government schools, choose it. This is a vote of no confidence in the public education system expressed through household economic choices rather than through the ballot box. The proportion of children enrolled in private schools has grown substantially over the past two decades, with some estimates suggesting private school enrolment now constitutes 40% or more of total school enrolment nationally.

The public-private divide in educational outcomes compounds Pakistan’s inequality. Children from households that can afford quality private education receive an education that, at the upper end of the market, is internationally competitive. Children in government schools receive a measurably inferior education. The education system, rather than being the great equaliser of a meritocratic society, is an inequality amplifier — sorting Pakistani children by parental income into radically different life trajectories from primary school age.

HEC Rankings, Graduate Unemployment and the Higher Education Illusion

Pakistan’s university system has expanded dramatically over the past twenty years — from fewer than 100 degree-awarding institutions to over 250 universities and affiliated colleges producing hundreds of thousands of graduates annually. The Higher Education Commission’s ranking exercise attempts to introduce quality differentiation, but the majority of Pakistan’s universities do not appear in any internationally recognised ranking system at competitive levels. Research output — measured by internationally peer-reviewed publications per faculty member, patent filings, or technology transfer activity — remains at levels far below comparable economies in the region.

More immediately problematic than research output is graduate employability. Graduate unemployment in Pakistan — the proportion of degree holders who cannot find employment matching their qualification level — is a growing structural problem. Employers consistently report that university graduates require substantial additional training before they are productive employees, reflecting the gap between Pakistani university curricula and labour market requirements. The expansion of university degree production without corresponding improvement in educational quality or labour market alignment is creating a graduate unemployment problem alongside a skills shortage — both simultaneously, in the same economy.

Malaysia 1970–2000 — What Education Investment Buys

Malaysia’s economic transformation from a commodities exporter in the 1970s to a diversified, technology-integrated manufacturing and services economy by the 2000s was built on a deliberate, sustained education investment strategy. Malaysia increased its education expenditure as a percentage of GDP progressively through the 1970s–1990s, reaching 5–6% of GDP, with deliberate curriculum design for industrial and technology workforce needs, expansion of technical and vocational education, and university research investment in engineering and applied sciences. The result was a workforce capable of sustaining the foreign direct investment inflows into electronics manufacturing that drove Malaysia’s middle-income emergence.

Pakistan at 1.7% of GDP on education is not on a trajectory toward a Malaysian outcome. It is on a trajectory toward a larger version of its current reality: a workforce insufficiently educated for high-productivity economic activities, dependent on low-skill remittance work for foreign exchange, and trapped in a low-skill equilibrium that makes the escape from middle- and lower-income status progressively harder. The knowledge economy aspiration is admirable. The investment commitment required to realise it is a political choice that Pakistan has consistently deferred. It cannot be deferred indefinitely without the cost becoming irreversible.

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Mehmood ul Hasan Qadir is an Economist and Financial Analyst based in Dubai, UAE. He writes on Pakistan’s economic structure, policy failures, and reform pathways for The Pakistan Ledger.