Tracking The Impacts Of Neoliberal Reforms On Public Sector Universities In Pakistan: A Mixed-Methods Case Study Of The University Of Karachi (2016–2026)

Abstract

Public sector higher education in Pakistan has undergone a series of structural shifts since the early 2000s that align with the broader logic of neoliberal reform: shrinking real-terms state subsidies, an expanding share of operating costs recovered from tuition, the contractualisation of academic labour, and a managerial reframing of universities as quasi-commercial entities responsible for their own fiscal sustainability. This paper examines how these shifts have played out at the University of Karachi (UoK), the largest public sector university in Sindh, between 2016 and 2026. The study draws on five semi-structured interviews with faculty and administrative staff conducted in 2024, longitudinal data from UoK admission prospectuses across seven academic years, the State Bank of Pakistan's consumer price index series, and contemporary documentation of the October 2024 student protests on campus.

Four findings emerge. First, real per-semester fees in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences nearly doubled in inflation-adjusted terms over the decade, while fees in already-expensive professional programmes grew far more modestly in real terms—a regressive distribution of the cost burden inconsistent with simple cost-recovery accounts. Second, closing percentages for open-merit admission collapsed across nearly every department between 2022 and 2025, with eight programmes falling to or near the 45 per cent eligibility floor. Third, despite Karachi's population having grown from 14.9 million in 2017 to 20.3 million in 2023, two flagship departments admitted fewer than half their allocated seats in both 2025 and 2026. Fourth, faculty appear largely insulated from the financial squeeze through salary increases and union representation, while students bear the cost without comparable channels for collective action—a pattern brought into sharp relief by the seven-day student protest at UoK in October 2024. Read together, these findings indicate that neoliberal reform at UoK has neither delivered the quality improvements promised by its proponents nor preserved the access function of the public university.