Daily Times

Due to special focus of the Prime Minister Imran Khan, Pakistan has rapidly demonstrated massive progress in the higher education sector.

Under the dedicated leadership of Federal Education Minister Shafqat Mahmood, the rankings of Pakistani universities have enhanced immensely in last 3 years. According to the UK’s TIMES University Rankings 2022, special focus and reforms led by PTI government’s leadership, and HEC team’s efforts, have reaped enormous fruits in putting Pakistan in the front row of countries making great improvements. Pakistan has now, for the first time, 36 universities in “The Impact Rankings” 2021.

On almost all key Higher Education indicators, Pakistan has emerged as world’s fastest improving nations on key metrics of higher education. Particularly in Research Citations, International Outlook, and Industry Linkages metrics, the improvement is among top five in the world. On Teaching score and Citation scores, the performance improvement is among fastest world over.

This is also demonstrated by huge score improvement in publications, staff, and teaching reputation: these are strongest performing indicators within Pakistan. These results were generated after 108 million citations and 430,000 data-points from participating institutions were analyzed.

In line with the PM’s vision of a green Pakistan, for the first time ever, a Pakistani university (University of Agriculture Faisalabad) is now ranked top 24th globally for Climate Action. Similarly, NUST is 67th leading university working on Affordable and Clean Energy.

All of these are key areas part of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) towards which PTI government has paid attention to, in order to improve lives of Pakistani masses. The TIMES University Rankings is the most prestigious global ranking. While UK has 101 Higher Education institutes and China has 97 institutions among top all 1,600 universities ranked, Pakistan has 21 universities in the list; this is a great achievement for a developing country like Pakistan.