“Very alarming” falls in university enrolments in Pakistan have been blamed on rising tuition fees, economic pressures faced by families and internal governance failures inside institutions.
Numbers attending university in the country dropped by nearly 12 per cent in three years, according to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26. Enrolment fell from 2.23 million in the academic year 2020-21 to 1.96 million in 2023-24.
According to the survey, government spending on education also fell to only 0.8 per cent of GDP in 2024-25, down from 1.5 per cent in 2023.
Saima Muneer, assistant professor of education at the University of the Punjab, said the situation was “very alarming” but she could not identify “one single reason” behind the decrease.
“In the past four or five years, the country has faced a very rapid economic decline…in terms of GDP, in terms of funding in education, because the higher education funding for universities is also being decreased at the provincial level and at the overall budget level, so universities are not getting that much funding.”
