Author Topic: Future of students returning from Kyrgyzstan at stake  (Read 1642 times)

Offline fizza bano

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Future of students returning from Kyrgyzstan at stake
« on: June 16, 2010, 06:50:20 AM »
Future of students returning from Kyrgyzstan at stake
The future of students, returning from Kyrgyzstan while leaving their education unfinished, is at stake as most of them are not ready to go back even if the situation normalizes there.

According to information, there are around 1,200 students currently studying at various educational institutions of Kyrgyzstan. Around 270 are stuck at the core of massacre — Osh — while the government of Pakistan is trying to make proper arrangements for the safe return of these students.

The arrival of students has started due to the serious efforts by the Pakistan government which was under pressure after the murder of a Pakistani engineering student, Ali Raza.

The students who are returning back from Kyrgyzstan are mainly the students of engineering and medical while there are a few who are also the students of arts. According to the students, they went to Kyrgyzstan because of the quality of education and relatively cheaper fee structures.

They said that the annual fee for the engineering and medical is around Rs0.2 million while the total expenditure including the house rent costs around Rs0.4 million which is far cheaper than the other countries.

A complicated situation has arisen after the return of these students as they have left their education in the middle and also have deposited their fee in their respective universities. The students have expressed their grave concerns over the career and appealed to the government to take immediate measures to accommodate them in Pakistani universities.

However, while talking to this scribe Ministry of Education Secretary Imtiaz Qazi said that since the students were taking higher education, the responsibility lies on Higher Education Commission(HEC) to accommodate them in some way or the other.

On the other hand, HEC Executive Director (ED) Dr Sohail Naqvi termed it impractical to accommodate these students in Pakistani universities. He said that education

system in Kyrgyzstan was entirely different from what has been prevailing in Pakistan. “The students could not possibly be accommodated in local universities as they would not be able to adjust and adopt the local education system,” he said.

Naqvi further said that the merit was really high in Pakistani universities and competition was really tough that’s why these students went to Kyrgyzstan to gain education as the merit there was low. “It would not be fair with the Pakistani students to accommodate these returning students in Pakistani universities nor it is practical to do so,” he said.

Naqvi said that the option they are considering right now to accommodate these students was to negotiate with the education institutions of other Central Asian states including Uzbekistan and Tajikistan where the education system and merit was equal to Kyrgyzstan. “We would try to accommodate them in the universities of Central Asian Countries and we are under process in doing so,” he said.

But the question here arises that why these students have to go all the way to Kyrgyzstan in order to get higher education when the education of these countries was not even equal to the education in developed countries like US, England and Australia.

According to a recent report by UNDP, only 5.1 per cent of the students in Pakistan have access to the higher education which is lowest in the region as India has more than 10 per cent access, Malaysia has around 28 per cent access while Korea has 80 per cent access to higher education.

In Pakistan only one student among six students gets the chance to avail higher education due to the absence of education facilities in higher education sector. And it is worth mentioning here the budget in the higher education sector has been witnessing the continuous decline over the past few years, which shows the commitment of the government towards the education sector.The news