Pakistan’s prominence in global diplomacy has risen in recent months as a result of the role the country has played in brokering negotiations between the USA, Iran and the Gulf countries. Inevitably, however, this will lead to questions about the ways in which its leaders are seeking to translate this recognition in a manner that supports people in the country as well as the wider region. A clear area in which Pakistan can leverage its current global standing is the higher education sector.
The stakes are considerable. Pakistan has one of the world’s largest youth populations, and demand for higher education is rising. Recent analysis by QAA (2025) notes that Pakistan has over 250 million people, around a third of whom are under 14, with university enrolment growing by more than 50 per cent over a decade. UK transnational higher education provision in Pakistan also grew from around 7,985 students in 2019–20 to 13,575 in 2022–23.
Transnational higher education refers to the arrangement in which a university delivers its degree in Pakistan, through either a branch campus, long-distance or online learning, or franchised programmes through a local university.
Pakistan is home to excellent universities and research institutes in both the public and private sectors. There are more than 260 universities and degree-awarding institutions, so the question is not whether Pakistan has a higher education base, but how that base can be connected more strategically to regional mobility, research collaboration and employment. Research excellence in Pakistan exists in fields ranging from the social sciences and humanities to the sciences, healthcare and medicine.
At the same time, new legislation introduced by the country’s Higher Education Commission and the provincial government of Punjab is developing policies that aim to encourage deeper engagement by international universities in the country. This is happening alongside Pakistan’s revised transnational education policy, updated in 2024, and growing UK-sector interest in Pakistan as an offshore education market. The outcomes of these initiatives, however, are still taking shape, making this an important moment for Pakistan to think carefully about what kind of international higher education strategy it wants to pursue.
In a sense, this is good news for Pakistan. The country requires the time and space to develop a suitable and strategic approach to its engagement with international institutions, rather than follow the path of other countries in the region. Focusing attention on encouraging foreign universities to establish in-country campuses raises numerous issues, from those relating to finance to others concerning free speech and academic freedom, as multiple examples from the UAE, China and Malaysia demonstrate.
Malaysia’s foreign branch campus model, for instance, has created lower-cost pathways to foreign degrees closer to home, while the UAE has become one of the world’s most visible hosts of international branch campuses. But these models also raise difficult questions: who can afford them, how much they strengthen local universities, and whether they create educational enclaves rather than national capacity.
Pakistan could develop a different and distinctive strategy, reflecting its own research and teaching strengths while also working with other countries in the region. It is heartening to see that work is already underway across the governments of both Uzbekistan and Pakistan to enhance higher education ties, as the recent meeting between Uzbekistan’s Ambassador in Islamabad, Alisher Tukhtaev, and Pakistan’s Federal Minister of State for Professional Education, Wajiha Qamar, demonstrates.
The development of a strategic approach to collaboration with countries including Uzbekistan, which is of growing importance to Pakistan’s economy, would enable cooperation in the development of research capacity and expertise, improving the relevance and standards of teaching, and addressing, in locally relevant ways, issues faced across South and Central Asia, including those relating to climate change, AI and the destabilising effects of geopolitics on trade and security.
A strategic approach would contribute to the expansion of business opportunities between the two countries and the wider regions in which they are located. Pakistani and Uzbek officials suggested recently that as many as 228 Pakistani companies operate in Uzbekistan, while the country’s Minister of Investment, Industry and Trade, Laziz Kudratov, has set a target of $2 billion in bilateral trade through industrial and new sector cooperation. Higher education institutions can support this work through deepening people-to-people contacts and facilitating the sharing of knowledge, expertise and skilled workers.
The development of a collaborative strategy for higher education between Pakistan and Central Asia would build on developments that have unfolded in the region during recent years. In the context of the war in Iran and discord between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Pakistan has opened new land corridors through Iran and China along which goods are being shipped to Central Asia. Simultaneously, new air corridors are also facilitating the movement of people and cargo between Tashkent and Islamabad, and potentially Karachi too.
These corridors are not only shaped by states, diplomats or large companies. As ethnographic work with Afghan and Central Asian merchants has shown, regional connectivity is often sustained from below by small traders, transporters, brokers, family firms and mobile commercial networks who move goods, credit and information across borders even when formal political relations are strained.
Developments can provide an underlying infrastructure for strategic, mutually beneficial and coordinated relationships between universities and research institutes in these countries. Their peoples share challenges and opportunities, including those arising from populations with high proportions of young people and communities facing the immediate effects of climate change. Working together on a regional higher education strategy that builds on existing local expertise, identifies and focuses on national and regional needs and priorities, and encourages people-to-people contacts through student exchange and academic mobility could help to translate achievements in the field of international diplomacy into tangible benefits for the citizens of both countries.
There are other reasons to focus on a regional approach to higher education. The countries in Europe and North America to which Pakistanis have travelled to study have become increasingly hostile environments. Rising levels of Islamophobia, manifested in public and online discussions and in support for populist political parties, are a cause of concern for students from Pakistan in countries including the UK, Germany and the USA. Recent events in Belfast, Northern Ireland, are just one instance of such dynamics and are a cause of concern for Pakistani parents with children studying in the UK.
At the same time, the governments of many countries in Europe and North America are implementing migration policies that are making established universities less and less attractive destinations for young Pakistanis, while also damaging their core teaching and research base. The UK remains an important destination, but it is becoming more expensive and less predictable. The UK student visa fee is now £558, and the Graduate visa route will fall from two years to 18 months for most applicants from January 1, 2027, although doctoral graduates remain eligible for three years. Yet demand remains high: Pakistan was among the largest sources of UK sponsored study visas in the year ending March 2024, with 33,941 visas granted.
To address these issues solely by supporting the development of campuses by foreign universities in Pakistan could constitute a missed opportunity. Strategically focusing on regional higher education partnerships and encouraging established higher education institutions in North America and Europe to participate in them could result, by contrast, in the development of a sustainable, relevant and equitable higher education environment.
To demonstrate its commitment to young people across the region, Pakistan could also seek to address one of the region’s most difficult and long-standing issues: Afghanistan. Like Pakistan and Uzbekistan, Afghanistan’s population is also young. Many of its talented men and women are keen to study but are locked out of universities by Taliban policies. This is part of a wider regional education crisis.
Unicef and Unesco reported in 2025 that Afghanistan had more than 2.13 million primary school-aged children out of school as of 2024, while restrictions on girls’ and women’s education have created a generational emergency. By facilitating opportunities for Afghan students, especially women, to study on its university campuses, Pakistan would both demonstrate its willingness to take a constructive first step towards restoring people-to-people ties between both countries and improve the prospects for establishing an innovative and forward-looking higher education infrastructure for the wider region.
A regional higher education strategy should not distract from Pakistan’s own education emergency. Unesco cites Pakistan Education Statistics 2023–24/2024–25, estimating 25.15 million children aged 5–16 out of school. This makes it even more important that higher education internationalisation is not limited to elite mobility, but linked to teacher training, public universities, technical education, digital access and provincial inclusion.
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