Quality education vital for rapid economic growth: AJK president

ISLAMABAD, June 22: The AJK President Sardar Masood Khan has stressed that we need to impart quality education to our youth to enable them to compete in the contemporary era of global competition.

Addressing a webinar titled “Quality Assurance in Higher Education” organised by the University of Kotli Azad Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday, he asserted that instead of focusing on good academic score grades, and GP, we would have to pay attention to determine the capacity and competence of graduates our universities are producing.

The State President said that we need to determine one’s educational competence according to the regional and global standards instead of the local criterion. “Quality of education has to be judges in comparison to the other institutions in the region”, he said.

Talking about the quality of education in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Sardar Masood Khan said that the state government had definitely focused on upgrading educational infrastructure and improving basic literacy rate but the time has come to set quality of education as our target because only competent, outstanding and extraordinary people would now be absorbed in the job market and those who can’t compete would be relegated to the sidelines.

He said that improvement of education was also inevitable for the rapid economic growth of the country and this is possible only if our universities and higher educational institutions focus on innovation and research and excellence.

“The need for quality education has further grown as our universities and educational institutions have introduced new disciplines and subjects, and we need to provide complete knowledge of new technologies to our students,” he added.

The AJK president said that we are lucky that some of the teachers foreign qualified and they must be provided with exposure and environment to utilise their knowledge and skills. He thanked the Higher Education Commission for providing guidance to improve education standards in our universities thereby enabling our nation to show outstanding performance in the field of education in recent decades. However, he said that more effort and struggle are still needed in this regard.

The State President emphasised that quality improves through frequent interactions with other institutions of higher education and said our universities need to approach other universities of the country and higher educational institutions abroad to utilise their knowledge and experiences.