PESHAWAR, June 4: The University of Peshawar will discontinue its four-year BS programme (evening shift) from the next academic session as it is going into loss.
Ironically, the evening shift of the four-year bachelor degree BS programme was launched by University of Peshawar (UoP) in 2009 to generate revenue.
UoP Vice-chancellor Dr Rasul Jan told Dawn that BS programme (second shift) didn’t prove to be financially viable and would be discontinued from September this year.
Talking about the financial problems faced by one of the oldest universities of the province, he said that some decisions taken during the last few years to generate finances for UoP created a ‘mess’. “Universities are not supposed to be money-making institutions,” he added.
Dr Jan said that he wanted to improve ranking of UoP nationally by taking measures to focus on quality instead of quantity in education. The teachers, who taught in the morning classes, also attended evening classes. They were overburdened and stressed and did not have any time to conduct research and publish articles and papers, he added.
“Papers and publications is what improve the ranking of a university,” said the vice-chancellor, who rephrased his vision for UoP saying, “either publish or perish.”
“We need to improve the quality of education by producing more PhDs,” he said. Currently, out of 680 teachers, only 220 have PhD degrees while about 340 are presently enrolled for PhD programme at the university.
Dr Jan was of the view that evening classes were not beneficial for the students since infrastructure like laboratories were not enough and students did not learn the way they should. There was also no hostel facility for the evening students although they paid high fees, he added.
About 2,200 students are enrolled at 43 departments and institutes of UoP. The BS programme students in the morning pay normal fee of Rs18,000 per annum whereas the students of second shift are charged Rs45,000 for science classes and Rs35,000 for arts.
On the other hand, UoP spends about Rs72,000 per year on one student under this programme in the second shift. The BS programme (second shift) is also different from the initially conceived one as the university is supposed to hire teacher for it but instead those teachers, who teach in the morning shift, are attending classes in the second shift on honoraria per class. The lecturers are paid Rs590 per class, assistant professor Rs700 and professors are paid Rs1000 per class in the evening shift.
However, Dr Jan said that despite financial and management challenges, he would not raise fee for the students. In the past UoP had raised fees of even its constituent colleges and schools to overcome financial losses but Dr Jan has a different approach to the issue.
Without making anyone angry, the vice-chancellor was confident that he would be able to manage the huge human resource at the university that often drag duties for long hours to claim ‘over-time’ unnecessarily. He said that some of the perks and privileges, which were given unnecessarily to the university employees, would be managed in a manner that it would stop waste of finances.
“I am going to cut expenses in some unimportant areas and divert the same to research and improvement of quality of education,” Dr Jan said.
Although 20 universities were providing higher education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in public sector, UoP was still the top priority of the students from all over the province, he claimed. Presently, the number of students enrolled at UoP is around 14,000.
Dr Jan, who has been working at University of Peshawar since 1985 opted to become vice-chancellor of University of Malakand in 2008, claims to be well aware of the ailments that have stunted the growth of UoP in the field of research.
Ranked nationally between 8-13 on Pakistan Council of Science and Technology’s list of chemists, he believes that UoP has all the potential to acquire a better position in national and international ranking if the quality of education and research is improved.
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