Pakistan’s real crisis is not a shortage of degrees. It is a shortage of human capital.
Pakistan now ranks 168th out of 193 countries on the UNDP’s 2025 Human Development Index, with an HDI value of 0.544, placing it firmly in the low-human-development category.
The education numbers are even more sobering. Pakistan’s latest Economic Survey reports public education expenditure at just 0.8% of GDP in FY2024–25 (July–March) dramatically below the 4–6% benchmark associated with international education financing commitments.
The consequences are structural. Pakistan has roughly 25 million children aged 5–16 out of school, according to a 2026 World Bank analysis, while earlier internationally comparable estimates put learning poverty at around 75–78% meaning that more than three-quarters of children may be unable to read and understand a simple age-appropriate text by age 10.
At the other end of the educational spectrum, Pakistan’s innovation challenge is equally revealing. The Global Innovation Index 2025 places Pakistan 99th among 139 economies, with a particularly weak position in innovation inputs (124th), despite ranking considerably better in innovation outputs (75th).
The gender dimension cannot be ignored. Pakistan’s latest Labor Force Survey reports female labor-force participation at 24.4% among people aged 10+ & 28.2% among those aged 15+ still extraordinarily low by international standards. Even more strikingly, unemployment among women with Master’s, M.Phil or PhD qualifications is 23.9%.
These are not merely education statistics. They are indicators of Pakistan’s productive capacity, social mobility, innovation potential and future economic competitiveness.
The policy response cannot be another isolated curriculum revision.
Pakistan needs a human-capital strategy: substantially higher and better-targeted education investment; foundational literacy and numeracy as national priorities; radically stronger teacher preparation; curricula built around critical thinking, digital competence and problem-solving; universities linked to industry and research; and deliberate pathways for educated women to enter and remain in the labor market.
Most importantly, we must stop judging educational success primarily by enrolment, examination results, degrees and publication counts.
The real question is far more consequential:- What can a Pakistani child, graduate, researcher or professional actually do because of the education system?
Until education produces capability at scale, Pakistan will continue to possess enormous human potential without fully converting it into human capital. Education is not expenditure. It is the infrastructure of national capability.
Riaz Laghari, Visiting Lecturer, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
