ISLAMABAD: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) was undertaking efforts toachieve the task of 1500 Pakistani students’ placement in PhD programmes attop ranked US universities under Phase-I of the US-Pakistan KnowledgeCorridor.
These efforts have resulted in partnerships and formal Documents ofUnderstanding (DoUs) between HEC and the US universities to support thisinitiative, the official sources from HEC said on Monday.
Talking to sources they revealed that the initiative aims to increase thenumber of faculty in tertiary education institutions with highest academicqualifications to improve the quality of teaching and research to prepareself-reliant, problem solving scholars.
HEC, they said, has signed Documents of Understanding with a number of USuniversities, while DoUs with several other universities were underdiscussion. The main objective of the initiative was to enable theacademically qualified 10,000 Pakistani students or faculty to pursue PhDstudies in US universities in selected fields, they added.
Under the initiative, the sources said, HEC also planned to impart trainingto1000-2000 potential candidates annually for admission in US universitiesthrough preparatory classes for English language and GRE under “TalentFarming Process” as per admission requirements of US universities.
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“The government envision enhancing enrollment in tertiary education up to7.1 million by 2025 and outreach of higher education institutions atdistrict level. For this purpose, US-Pak Knowledge Corridor will provideopportunities for 10,000 Pakistani scholars for doctoral studies enablinghigher educational institutions to have highly qualified PhD faculty” theyremarked.
It is worth mentioning here that a total of 99 scholars, including 70 maleand 29 female scholars, have so far been awarded scholarships under theinitiative, while 87 students were on board with 12 others in the pipeline.
In that regard a team of Admission Directors of Nine US universities hadvisited the Higher Education Commission (HEC) recently to discusspossibilities of institutional agreements for admission and placement ofPakistani scholars in the US universities under the US-Pakistan KnowledgeCorridor.
