Get the latest news and updates from Dawn
THE recently revealed QS World Universities Rankings 2027 have become a topic of considerable conversation for Pakistani social and print media. Reports and posts on the subject have mainly pointed out that no Pakistani university has been ranked among the world’s top 350 universities. The Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU), at 381, is our top entry in the QS rankings. However, we should remember that a number of individual programmes — though not the overall university position — are ranked much higher. Nust, the University of Engineering & Technology and the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute have engineering programmes ranked in the 100-200 range; Lums and IBA have similar rankings for economics, business and social science programmes; AKU is ranked high for medicine programmes.
The rankings are, at best, a rough measure of quality. But they do reveal a lot. If we do not have a university in the top 350, it does say quite a bit about the priority accorded to education in Pakistan. And, knowing our budget allocations for education in general as well as higher education, and our other spending priorities, it is not a surprise. If our government spends less than one per cent of GDP on education, including expenditure on school education, is it any surprise that we do not have any universities in the top 350?
