Daily Times

An unusual advantage of belonging to a third world country is that, a truckload of brilliance coupled with some smart planning and self-marketing can land you a hefty scholarship and a place at a foreign  university. A student on way to her dream education in a foreign land goes through various stages of struggle. The sheer process of preparing admission applications, securing reference from ever busy academicians or arrogant employers, filling out scholarship applications is just the tip of the iceberg.

The tedious and pricey process put in place by the Higher Education Commission for attestation of documents is part of another 100 meter hurdle race towards securing student visa. After a lot of determination, sweating and acing of red tape bound procedures, the student gets a chance to appear in the ever crazy visa centre for the visa application submission and interview.

The brilliant student enters another house of madness. The visa issuance centre is the Holy Grail. Even the Pakistani employees of this Charlie’s chocolate factory will treat the applicants with a British East Indian Company’s post 1857 contempt. Pakistanis have a transformative effect on their behaviours as soon as they sit in a position of power to play with fates of ordinary hapless men.

The real fun will start during the visa interview; a student will find him/herself staring into a blank wall with a microphone and headphones. The interviewer will start the probing with some pre-conceived perceptions of Pakistani student’s fraudulent intentions to make UK their permanent home.

Though one may think that life will be hunky dory and filled with rainbows now. However, the foreign university stage is something a student can seldom do anything about. Even a distinction holder from a top university will find himself struggling to cope up with the structure of studies. Not that the fault is with the structure, this is based on conceptual readings, argumentative writing and evidence-based research. A Pakistani student, sadly has very less mastery over these essential skills. If the Pakistani students do well, it’s all because either they are very quick learners, naturally gifted or extremely hardworking; and not because of a skill if any, they learnt at the Pakistani schools, colleges or universities.

Our university professors abhor getting questioned and consider themselves to be undisputed and unchallenged master of all subject knowledge. This kills any notion of the critical thinking in students. Disagreement with any of the professor results in lower grades and a ruined chance of any hope to get admission in foreign universities. Professors are self-proclaimed Gods in their operational academic circles.

In many cases, a degree is a piece of paper that is supposed to get boys a job and girls a viable marriage partner. In some universities, students have come up with a lucrative business of writing research papers for students who either are not trained enough to write, have lots of money or have little motivation to write a tedious paper when the same can be written by paying an amount between Rs. 10,000 to 20,000 for a paper.

In many cases, a degree is a piece of paper that is supposed to get boys a job and girls a viable marriage partner

The blame can be laid upon the crooked education system that is marred by political appointees and rent seeking academia. The price, however, is being paid by the students who on the sheer power of their self-belief and capabilities reach a place of better quality education. They are not trained to excel. They are not even prepared to survive.  They have to go through a long bitter process of unlearning and relearning.

There is no concept of evidence based statements either in our daily conversations or our written work. We are a nation of rhetoric, in our learning and in our actions. Our education system from the primary class to the university level is a journey of disillusionment. All this confusion is augmented by the deteriorated level of education equally at the costly glamorous multi-billionaire private schools and the lackluster public schools.

If out of all this chaos, a student is courageous and talented enough to climb the ladder into a prestigious foreign university, more than often, she hits the performance glass ceiling caused by a lifetime of evidence lacking education. That is the reason we see very few Pakistani students going through to PhDs from the normal course of masters as compared to other Asian nationalities.

A few suggestions for improvement are to at least start from somewhere, either at the bottom reforming schooling systems or from the university level education, changing the style of education and matching up to foreign universities. Education, all over the world lean towards knowledge creation at schooling systems, where as we consider cramming as the epitome of landing a successful career. The visa processing for students, the scholarship opportunities, the educational systems all need a reform and it’s about time we started it.

The writer is an Oxford graduate in public policy, a Weidenfeld Scholar and an Oxford Global leadership fellow

Published in Daily Times, July 23^rd , 2017.