Get the latest news and updates from Dawn
I have worked on my university’s Admission Committee for 16 years, long enough to have watched several cycles of both growth and contraction. But nothing in those years prepared me for what the last three or four have looked like, and nothing about the current decline is evenly spread. It is concentrated, sharply, among girls applying to evening programmes.
When I began speaking directly with hesitant applicants and their parents to understand why confirmed seats were being given up, the reasoning was strikingly consistent, and stated without much hesitation. “In this inflation, why should I spend such a heavy amount on my daughter’s education when there is no job security for her in the future?” one mother asked me plainly. With no guaranteed job waiting at the end of an evening degree, she said, that money was better saved for her daughter’s dowry and wedding than spent on tuition. She was not the only parent to put it like that. These were not abstractions to me. They were mothers, often visibly uneasy themselves, explaining a trade-off they felt they had no real choice but to make.
Every admission cycle now brings the same quiet moment in our committee meetings: a target intake number that used to be a formality is instead a subject of real concern. Punjab’s Higher Education Department reports admissions down 20 to 30 per cent across many public universities this year, and national enrolment has fallen nearly 12pc, or roughly 262,000 students, since its 2020-21 peak, according to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025. Sitting on my own university’s admission and financial aid committees, I no longer read those figures as an abstraction. I watch them happen, one hesitant applicant at a time.
