HEC sets up a 22 member task force to finish Pakistan's national university ranking
The panel will settle indicators, weightings and verification for the ranking. Seventeen universities and three provincial bodies sit on it, and no date for its report has been given.
The Higher Education Commission has handed the hardest part of a national university ranking to a 22 member task force: deciding what counts and how much. The National Task Force on National University Rankings, announced on 4 November, will review and finalise a proposed framework, and no date has been given for its report.
The commission says the panel will draw on international ranking methods while allowing for Pakistan's higher education system. It will examine indicators, their weightings, assessment methods, data requirements, verification procedures and scoring. The convenor is Dr Ghulam Mustafa, director of the Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS). The secretary is Muhammad Ali Baig, HEC's national coordinator for university rankings and a deputy director of its Higher Education Data Repository.
Who sits on the panel
Seventeen universities are named: Aga Khan University, Fatima Jinnah Women University, Khyber Medical University, King Edward Medical University, LUMS, Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, the National College of Arts, NUST, PIEAS, Quaid i Azam University, the University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the University of Agriculture Faisalabad, the University of Balochistan, UET Lahore, the University of Karachi, the University of Peshawar and the University of the Punjab. Three provincial bodies sit beside them: the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Higher Education Department, the Punjab Higher Education Commission and the Sindh Higher Education Commission.
Our reading of the mix
Of the 17 universities, six are general universities, four are engineering and technology institutions, three, including Aga Khan University, focus on medicine and health, and one each covers arts, agriculture, women's education and management. Only two, Aga Khan University and LUMS, are private. None is a computing focused institution such as FAST NUCES, COMSATS or the Information Technology University, although NUST and PIEAS teach computing.
That matters because a single national formula treats a medical university, an art school and an engineering campus alike unless the weightings are set by discipline. For readers choosing a computer science programme, discipline level scores would tell them more than any overall order.
Design choices are where such rankings succeed or fail. If universities are scored on data they submit themselves, verification decides credibility, and verification procedures are on the task force's list. Weightings also steer behaviour: a formula that rewards publication counts invites more papers, not necessarily better ones. A formula that gave heavy weight to graduate outcomes would instead reward universities with strong links to employers, which would matter to the technology sector.
The task force has not published a timeline, draft indicators or weightings. Those are the first things to look for when its report appears.
