I’m on an admissions committee and universities need to talk about this

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.

It is worth pausing on why this trade-off falls so heavily on girls specifically. Evening programmes have long served students, many of them women, who could not attend morning classes because of household responsibilities or affordability, making the evening seat itself already a hard-won compromise. That families are now weighing a daughter’s tuition against her dowry tells us this is no longer only a story about the price of education. It is a story about whose future a stretched household chooses to invest in when it can no longer confidently invest in both, and a reminder that when trust in a degree’s payoff collapses, it is often girls who lose their seat first.

Much of the public conversation about this decline reaches for the obvious culprits: inflation, tuition, currency depreciation, a job market that cannot absorb the roughly 445,000 graduates Pakistan produces each year, of whom by some estimates over 31pc remain unemployed. These are real pressures, and they matter. But as someone who has spent 16 years inside a public sector education department, I think the more uncomfortable diagnosis is closer to home: we in higher education have been slow to prove that what we teach is still worth four years of a young person’s life.

I say this carefully, because it is not a comfortable thing for an academic to admit. But when I talk to prospective students and their parents, the hesitation is rarely just about money. It is about whether the degree on offer will actually change anything. Families increasingly compare a four-year programme against a six-month coding bootcamp, a freelancing certificate, or simply a plane ticket. Too often, and too honestly, the university does not win that comparison, because our curricula have not moved as fast as the labour market has.

This is where I think the profession, including institutions like my own, needs to look inward rather than only outward. Degree programmes across the public sector still largely run on syllabi and delivery methods designed for a different economy. Employers now want demonstrable, specific skills; we are still largely credentialing years completed. Until departments treat curriculum review as a standing, funded obligation rather than an occasional exercise, no amount of scholarship money will fully answer the question families are asking: what, exactly, will this degree let my child do that they could not do otherwise?

None of this means the economic pressures are secondary. Over 727,000 Pakistanis left for work abroad in 2024-25 alone, and roughly one in three graduates aged 25 to 35 say they have considered migration. For many households, a local postgraduate degree increasingly looks like a costly detour on the way to an exit visa rather than a necessary step. Addressing that will require targeted, income-linked scholarships and student-loan schemes rather than the thinly spread support most provinces currently offer.

But if I had to choose one lever that universities themselves control, and are not pulling hard enough, it is trust. Departments should publish graduate employment outcomes as openly as they publish merit lists. Every programme should be able to show, in plain numbers, what its last three cohorts are doing now. Where that number is uncomfortable, it should drive reform, not silence. Where it is strong, it should be the first thing prospective students see, not an afterthought buried in a prospectus.

I do not think the decline in admissions is a temporary dip that will correct itself once inflation eases. It is a verdict, delivered by thousands of individual families doing their own arithmetic on cost, risk, and return. Reversing it will take more than another extended deadline. It will take those of us inside the system proving, programme by programme, that a Pakistani university degree still opens a door worth walking through.