When the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2027 came out this week, the headline for Pakistan was a short and uncomfortable one: of the 56 Pakistani universities that were ranked, not a single one made it into the top 400, and our best institution, Quaid-i-Azam University, could only manage a place in the 551-600 band, with NUST in the 601-650 band and COMSATS in the 651-700 band behind it. The University of the Punjab sits somewhere between 801 and 1000, the University of Karachi has slipped into the 1601-1800 group, and a few others, like Khyber Medical University and NED, are placed at 1801-2000, which tells us that the gap between our strongest campuses and the best in the world is not a small one that can be closed with a few tweaks.
It becomes even harder to ignore when we look at who is at the top and who is climbing. Oxford has held first place for the 11th year in a row, MIT is second, Princeton and Stanford share third, and seven American and three British universities fill the top ten, which is hardly surprising for places that have spent decades and enormous sums building research cultures. What should really make us think is Asia, where China now has 17 universities in the top 200, Japan has five, and Malaysia’s University of Malaya has entered the top 200 for the first time, because these are countries that were not so far ahead of us a generation ago and that simply decided to treat their universities as something worth paying for.
There will always be people who say that rankings are unfair, that they favour Western institutions or measure the wrong things, and they are not completely wrong, since no list can capture everything a university does for its students or its society. But the THE ranking looks at teaching, research volume, how often a university’s work is cited by others, and how connected it is to the wider world, and if our universities keep scoring poorly on these year after year, then blaming the method only helps us avoid the real question of what is going wrong at home.
Part of the answer is money, because Pakistan spends very little on higher education, which means labs are short of equipment, libraries are short of journals, and young researchers have few grants to apply for, so even talented people struggle to do serious work. Another part is the way research is treated in our system, where many teachers publish papers mainly because their promotion depends on a count, not because they are trying to answer a question that matters to the country, and this naturally produces quantity without much quality. Then there is the steady loss of good people, since the best students and teachers often find better pay and more respect abroad and do not come back, and there is the weak governance in many universities, where leadership posts do not always go to the most capable person and campus politics eats into time that should go to learning.
All of this also shows up outside the university gate, because graduates often leave with degrees but without the skills employers want, and industry and universities rarely work together, so research that could become a useful product usually ends up on a shelf.
None of this is impossible to fix, but it needs decisions that go beyond speeches. The government should raise spending on higher education and tie the money to results, vice-chancellors should be chosen strictly on merit, universities should reward research that is original and useful instead of simply counting papers, and teachers and scientists should be paid well enough to stay, while real partnerships with industry and with strong foreign universities should bring in new ideas, skills, and funding.
Underneath all of these steps is a simple change of attitude, which is to accept that a university is meant to teach young people how to think and solve problems, not just hand out certificates. A country that does not build such places will keep borrowing ideas and technology from others, and the rankings are only telling us, politely, that we are already doing that.
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