Med to math: PEC’s misguided curveball

A few days ago, some newspapers carried a news item that has not created a lot of waves yet. In its 49th meeting, the Governing Body of the Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC), the national regulator for engineering programmes, decided to allow pre-medical students to be considered for admission to engineering programmes.

This decision was disseminated via a letter dated July 11 to vice-chancellors, rectors, and heads of all higher education institutions in Pakistan. The FSc/ HSSC pre-medical programme differs from the pre-engineering programme in one critical subject: Mathematics. Pre-engineering students take two years of Mathematics, which is replaced by Biology in pre-medical.

MBBS and BDS medical programmes are among the most sought-after and selective university programmes. In the past, pre-medical students who were not successful in getting accepted to medical/dental programmes of their choice had the option to change track to a programme that requires mathematics at the FSc level – like engineering – by spending another year and additionally taking grade XI and XII Mathematics exams. For many, the price of doing this is a one-year delay before being admitted into a university programme of choice.

The PEC’s decision creates a new pathway into engineering programmes for pre-medical students that does away with the necessity of taking FSc Mathematics and spending another year in high school. Instead, pre-medical students will be able to take a different variant of the entry test (one that will have to be lighter on Mathematics).

In addition, universities will be required to develop a condensed, eight-week Math foundation course that students from the pre-medical pathway will have to clear to convert their provisional admission to an engineering programme into an unconditional admission. Up to 40 per cent of engineering seats may be occupied by applicants entering through this new pre-medical pathway.

To ascertain if letting pre-medical students into engineering programmes is the right decision, we need to answer a single question: Will it lead to universities graduating better-prepared engineers? Or, putting in terms of the Washington Accord’s quality assurance framework that the PEC celebrated recently, will it improve the achievement level of stated Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs)?

Pre-medical students provisionally admitted into engineering programmes will have eight weeks to cover all FSc pre-engineering Math. In grade XI, that includes number theory, set theory, matrices, quadratic equations, algebra, series, combinatorics, induction, and the binomial theorem, and about half of the curriculum comprises trigonometry. In grade XII, this is followed up by functions and limits, calculus, analytic geometry, inequalities, linear programming, and vector spaces.

Anyone who has ever taken pre-engineering Math, even if it was years ago, can attest that expecting students to pick up all these concepts and developing the necessary level of comfort that pre-engineering students attain from problem drilling over two years, cannot be achieved in eight weeks. I would love to be proven wrong – but I am not.

For reference, most American universities allow students wide flexibility to change majors after admission if students can fulfill the prerequisites for transfer. A student who did not take the right math courses in high school could easily spend an extra year in university catching up on the requirements to switch to an engineering major.

British universities do not accept students to engineering (even computer science) programs who did not take Mathematics as a subject in their A-levels. There must be a reason they are not just making students take an eight-week remedial course to make up for what they missed in years of high school.

The rationale given by the PEC registrar for opening the doors to engineering programmes reported in newspapers, once guarded as tightly as those of medical programmes, is something I wrote about in these pages a few weeks ago (‘Telco to tech: the shift in education’, July 1): Demand for admission to engineering programmes is experiencing a significant downtrend. Engineering program seats in some institutions are going unfilled, something unheard of a few years ago, and engineering departments at some universities have been shuttered for lack of sufficient interest.

A 2023 report by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (‘Disaggregating the graduate unemployment in Pakistan’) reported that between 2018-19 and 2020-21, the unemployment rate of engineering graduates more than doubled, rising from 11.2 to 23.5 per cent. Meanwhile, over the same period, the average unemployment rate of graduates in Pakistan rose less dramatically, from 14.9 to 16.1 per cent.

This lacklustre demand for engineers in Pakistan does not stem from the profession falling into global irrelevance but from years of domestic de-industrialization and anaemic economic growth. In his book, ‘The Coming Wave’, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, wrote in great length about the technologies of the future that are most likely to change the world. He included AI, biotechnology, synthetic biology, DNA printing, clean energy, quantum computing, robotics, battery technology, etc. About half of them require engineering expertise of some kind.

A likely contributing factor in the decline in interest in engineering is the simultaneous growth in computer science programmes, spurred on by daily headlines of advances in AI making. The PEC’s recent decision will grow the pool of applicants eligible for admission to engineering programmes. Relaxing the entry criteria into the profession will do nothing to increase the domestic job market’s demand for engineers. However, what it will do is lower the quality of graduates and dilute the value of engineering degrees.

What precipitated this policy change by the PEC? I posit that it is a solution but for a different problem. Engineering programmes, some of questionable quality, mushroomed across private universities in Pakistan in the 2000s. As the growth of the telco sector slowed and saturated, employment opportunities shifted to the startup sector, and so did applicant interest in computer science programmes.

That has led to flagging demand for engineering programmes, particularly at for-profit, fly-by-night private institutions which tend to have a higher cost of attendance compared to their public counterparts (they are, after all, for-profit). That is not to say that engineering programmes at public universities are immune to this trend – several public universities at the peripheries in tier-3 cities are experiencing the same drop in applications.

I spoke to several vice-chancellors of public universities that will be affected by this PEC decision in confidence. None of them are supportive of this change to the PEC Regulations for Engineering Education in Pakistan. That begs the question: if public universities are not keen on admitting pre-medical students to engineering universities, who lobbied for such a major change in admission criteria?

Hastily fixing up pre-medical students, bandaging them up (pun intended) with what will likely be an inadequate eight-week Math course, to gain entry into engineering programmes will achieve two things: (1) compound the crisis of quality and employability among engineers; and (2) fill up seats for engineering programmes that may otherwise go unfilled.

The PEC’s decision to admit pre-medical students into engineering programmes is a shortsighted solution to a complex problem. It is crucial to remember that attracting students is just one part of the equation. The larger challenge lies in fostering a robust engineering ecosystem within Pakistan. This involves nurturing industries that can employ graduates, promoting research and development, and cultivating a culture of innovation.

Simply put, we need to create an environment where engineers are not just produced but can find purpose and are valued. The risk of this policy is that it might inadvertently devalue the engineering profession by admitting students who will be inadequately prepared for its rigours. This could lead to a surplus of underprepared engineers, further exacerbating the employability crisis.

Instead of hastily implemented fixes, Pakistan needs a comprehensive strategy that addresses the root causes of the issue, ensuring that the engineers we produce are not just qualified but capable of driving the nation's technological and economic progress.

The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.