A warning issued by the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council should have sent shockwaves through the country’s already fragile healthcare system. The regulator has identified at least ten universities offering unrecognised postgraduate medical and dental programmes, cautioning that such qualifications will not be registered; effectively rendering them useless for professional practice. At the same time, the crisis appears far more widespread. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has recently flagged over 100 fake, illegal, or unauthorised institutions and campuses operating across Pakistan, warning that degrees issued by them have no legal or academic value.
At the heart of this controversy lies a deeply troubling reality: institutions entrusted with shaping doctors are instead producing degrees of doubtful legitimacy. The inclusion of Gomal University (a historic public-sector university founded by the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) underscores how far standards have slipped. The other nine healthcare universities are run by private entities or are not very prominent public sector universities. Gomal University, however, is a different story, catering to over 20,000 students. It is unfortunate that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government pays little attention to this institute, which has nearly 70 campuses or affiliated institutions, drawing in youth across the province. What should have been a beacon of opportunity for underserved regions now risks becoming emblematic of regulatory decay. The healthcare implications are particularly alarming. Medical education is not a conventional academic pursuit. It is, quite literally, a matter of life and death-a question of who lives and who dies. Even if such graduates are eventually barred from practice, the mere existence of these programmes undermines trust in the entire medical education pipeline.
Pakistan is not new to the menace of fraudulent qualifications. The infamous fake degree scandal linked to Axact revealed how industrial-scale diploma mills could operate with impunity, selling thousands of bogus credentials worldwide. That episode should have triggered lasting reform. Instead, the recurrence of similar concerns within the regulated domain of medical education suggests that lessons remain unlearned. Political connections, meanwhile, often shield vice chancellors from accountability, enabling mismanagement to persist unchecked. There is also a profound socio-economic dimension to this crisis. For many students, particularly from peripheral regions, admission into such programmes represents years of financial sacrifice and hope. To discover later that their degrees are worthless is a devastating personal and economic blow.
The response required must therefore be decisive and multi-layered. The federal Higher Education Commission and the PMDC must jointly undertake an immediate, transparent audit of all medical and allied health programmes across the country. Provincial governments, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, also need to be held accountable for regulatory oversight of public institutions under their jurisdiction. Those who have enabled this quiet erosion of standards-whether through negligence, complicity, or wilful disregard-must finally be held to account. *