By Saif Ur Rehman
Between January 2024 and November 2025, more than 1.4 million Pakistanis registered with the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment to work abroad. Among them, by the bureau’s own count, were over 5,000 doctors, 11,000 engineers and 13,000 accountants. At home, meanwhile, the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), which ranks Pakistan sixth globally in human capital flight, estimates that 31 per cent of university graduates are unemployed; among women with degrees, the figure exceeds 50 per cent. We are producing more graduates than at any point in our history, and we are either exporting them or failing to employ them.
Every discussion of this crisis rounds up the usual suspects: shrinking higher education budgets, political instability, a stagnant economy. All are real. But there is a quieter culprit, one that precedes a graduate’s first job application by four years, the way we admit students into universities in the first place.
Admission in Pakistan remains an overwhelmingly quantitative exercise. Marks in the Higher Secondary School Certificate and scores in entry tests decide a student’s academic future with little regard for aptitude, interest or purpose. Merit is reduced to a number, and education becomes a process of sorting rather than understanding.
The consequences begin on day one. Students enter programmes not because they chose them with conviction but because their marks opened some doors and closed others. The pre-medical student who misses a medical seat drifts into computer science; the engineering aspirant lands in a discipline they never considered. The mismatch follows them into classrooms and then into workplaces, where employers have noticed: a survey of Pakistani employers reported in 2019 found 78 per cent dissatisfied with the skills of fresh graduates. A degree, it turns out, certifies a score; it does not certify direction.
The distortion reaches backwards into schooling itself. When admission hinges on marks alone, colleges rationally teach to the number. Rote crowds out reflection, and the one question that should matter most — why do you want to study this? is never asked, because nothing in the system rewards an answer.
The Higher Education Commission’s Undergraduate Studies Admission Test (USAT) is a genuine improvement on this landscape. It standardises comparison across boards and regions, it is now conducted quarterly in a dozen cities, and Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan’s top ranked Higher Education Institute, signed on in June to use it for its fall 2026 admissions. Yet the HEC itself has clarified that USAT is recommended, not mandatory; each university retains full autonomy. More fundamentally, standardisation is not the same thing as meaning. USAT makes merit lists more uniform without making them more insightful. There is a quiet irony here: the test’s designers included an essay of 400 to 500 words, in Urdu or English — a tacit admission that numbers alone cannot capture a candidate.
If reform must begin somewhere, it should begin at the point of entry. Marks and tests should remain part of the process, but they cannot remain its entirety. Universities should introduce structured qualitative elements: a statement of purpose and, where intake allows, faculty-led interviews. A well-designed statement does more than filter applicants; it compels a 17-year-old, perhaps for the first time, to articulate why they are choosing a field and what they hope to do within it. It also places faculty before applicants prior to admission, turning gatekeepers into mentors.
None of this is exotic. LUMS already requires a personal statement and recommendation letters alongside test scores; Habib University interviews shortlisted candidates and asks for a record of their engagements beyond the classroom. Abroad, Britain’s UCAS system and America’s Common Application have paired grades with personal statements for decades. Pakistan does not need to invent holistic admissions; it needs to democratise them beyond a handful of elite private institutions.
The obvious objection deserves to be met head-on: essays and interviews can favour the already privileged. A polished personal statement comes easier from an English-medium school in Lahore than from an Urdu-medium college in Rajanpur, and a coaching industry already sells statement-writing courses to LUMS aspirants. Any national reform must therefore be designed against this risk: statements accepted in Urdu and regional languages, USAT already permits Urdu essays, assessment against published rubrics that reward substance over polish, and a capped weightage of perhaps 10 to 15 per cent of the merit score, so that a rural topper is never undone by prose style.
The second objection is scale and discretion. Our large public universities process tens of thousands of applications in a cycle, and any discretionary element in Pakistan invites the suspicion of sifarish. The answers here are procedural rather than utopian: pilot the reform in limited-intake and flagship programmes first; have faculty panels score statements against written rubrics, with records open to audit; and keep the quantitative floor intact, so that qualitative assessment adjusts merit at the margins instead of manufacturing it.
Higher education is not a continuation of schooling. It is the stage at which individuals acquire an intellectual identity and a professional direction, and a system that admits them as numbers should not be surprised when it graduates them without either. Marks matter; the question is whether they should matter alone. Until merit is understood to include purpose, aptitude and reflection, we will keep compiling tidier merit lists for a workforce employer without trust and a country its brightest keep leaving. The reform we need begins with a simple shift — from evaluating students as numbers to recognising them as individuals.
The writer is a content-writer and a Law Graduate from School of Law, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad and may be reached at saifurrehman.office@gmail.com
