Let me now turn to our task force. We were created by the World Bank and by UNESCO as an international commission of independent experts. What we produced is not an official World Bank document. Although, actually the President of the World Bank, Mr. Wolfenson received the document and associated himself with our findings, but the question is why did the World Bank create the commission at this time? I think one reason is perfectly obvious. I think, that any thinking person who lives in the world as it is functioning today, will understand instinctively the growing importance of higher education for social and economic development; and I think, for that reason the Bank wanted to get a group of people who are knowledgeable, to examine that issue. 

There was another important issue, which may not have been on the Banks' mind became obvious to us very, very quickly. And that is that the contribution of Higher Education to national development and poverty eradication had traditionally been mis-measured by social scientists. I don't need to go into detail about this issue, but the basic fact is that social scientists and economists, gave particular measure to contribution of education in terms of the private return to the individual. And that is particularly a poor way of looking at the contribution of higher education, because the public return to higher education is particularly important. My contribution to society such as it is, I hope is not measured by my salary. It is measured most of all by perhaps the number of people I taught, the research I produced and items of this kind and this is of course completely ignored by the way in which we have measured the higher education traditionally. 

Furthermore in an age of knowledge revolution (and I will have a little bit more to say about that in a little while), human capital is the key and higher education is absolutely crucial in raising the level of human capital. As Dr. Vellani already mentioned, we were given 80% of the world, because 80% of the world is classified as developing. Essentially 20% of the world are the rich countries and every thing else is called developing. And obviously no one can prescribe for 80% of the world. Cultures differ, systems differ, and the task for us was not to design solutions, but to suggest problems and to suggest ways to approach the issues. And I have to say that what is happening in Pakistan is exactly what we dreamed about when we did our work. We hoped that our report would start a series of discussions and that different countries would use the problems that we have allowed it to and begin the process of examining themselves and developing their own solutions. 

Let me now turn to the report itelf. We attempted to answer three questions:

1. What is the role of higher education in enhancing and supporting economic and social development? 

2. What are the measured obstacles for higher education in performing that crucial role? 

3. How can these obstacles be overcome? 

I have already said we cannot deal with specific countries. Specific countries have to deal with these issues themselves. But what we tried to do instead was to produce an essay, designed to stimulate examination and discussion that will deal with our arguments from the point of view of each particular country. We based our arguments on hearings. We went to South Africa, Latin America and Europe. In America and South Africa at many different places we reviewed the literature, we sent drafts of our report literally to hundreds of people and took their criticism and advice and our task force itself had a considerable amount of human capital on it. I have already mentioned: Syed Babar Ali; my Co-Chair was Mamphela Ramphele, who was the Vice Chancellor of Cape Town University -- a distinguished South African Academic. We had a former Swedish Minster of Sciences. We had a former Minister from Chile. We had representatives from Japan and Indonesia, a former Brazilian Academic and a Minister of Education -- a very widely based group. 

Our report is divided into a description of the current situation in the developing world from the point of view of higher education (in other words a base line as it exists today) and then five topics that we chose because of their importance, and because of the fact that they had not been dealt with sufficiently. There is a great deal of discussion, when I come to higher education, that deals with finances or that deals with current information technology, and these indeed are very important topics, and we do touch upon them, but the topics that we actually suggested that we actually chose to study, rather, have been I think, largely ignored and are at the very root of the problem of higher education as we see it. 

Let me begin with the base line. What is the situation of higher education in the developing world today? First thing you can say is that there are a series of traditional difficulties that need a little elaboration I think, in a country like Pakistan, where these difficulties are very much in evidence frequently -- inadequate qualification for faculty, and poor facilities. I hate to say that in this wonderful university but we all know that it is not exactly typical of Pakistan’s higher education. Poor compensation, funding that fluctuates a great deal -- those are all traditional difficulties, but add to that what we called new realities and the new realities are tremendous expansion of private education. More and more students want higher education and a most rapidly growing part of higher education is private for profit education. That is the sector that is growing most rapidly all over the world and it is frequently of very poor quality. It is uncontrolled, highly differentiated and sometimes this growth is almost malignant in nature. Another new reality that is of very great significance (I had mentioned) is the knowledge revolution and its corollary -- globalization -- that appears to increase the already large gap between the rich and the poor countries and that I think has made higher education more important that it has ever been before in human history. As far as growing gap is concerned I think there can be relatively little question about that. I ran into an article in financial times recently, which said the following: "According to the world development report, global interpersonal inequality arose substantially in the 19th Century. That was as a result of a classic industrial revolution and remained more or less constant in the first half of the 20th century. The fact that it remains constant shows that some of the less developed countries manage to do a certain amount of catching up. It then arose again though not very rapidly in the second half of the 20th century and a more detailed study by the World Bank suggests that global inequality arose sharply between 1987 and 1993 and if the figures were available to 2001, I believe that the problem would be even more serious. So as a result of the technological revolution, of the knowledge revolution, of the knowledge based society, of the importance of human capital, particularly at the high skill level, there is again a growing gap between the rich and the poor countries. 

For those of you who have any interest in economic history this I think will be very easy to understand. For example the industrial revolution of the 18th century, which was based on the mechanizations of the textile industry had very little contribution from higher education. Even you know James Watt who built the early steam engines in Britain in the early part of the 19th century, which was so important in the industrial revolution had no conception of the science that underlay the steam engine. He did not need to. He knew how to do it practically, but it was not the question of scientific knowledge. As through the rest of the 19th century, even electricity had not much to do really with the movement of university learning into industry. It is rather the reverse as is the fact--the practical application in some sense taught higher education. But if you look at the developments since world war II, if you look at the information technology revolution, if you look at the biomedical sciences at genetics, at Genomic and at aspects of physics, we are now in a situation where, what the university teaches, the knowledge that the university has, is absolutely crucial for a country to progress. I think that is pretty clear. 

Having established these new realities we turn to our first major topic, which is to consider the public interest in higher education, and by that we mean something rather specific. You know that today globalization is occurring rapidly, and markets are more and more important as countries all over the world seek to privatize. Privatize this, privatize that and the feeling is of course that markets are the most efficient way of allocating resources, and there is no doubt for example that the wealth of the United States, and many of the European countries have been very much helped by allowing the markets to operate. But one has to understand that when it comes to education and specifically the higher education, while market can play a major and beneficial role, there are very important aspects of higher education that markets will not deliver. I want to stress this point, because I think it is very easy, too easy in a way too tempting for governments to say "let the markets deliver higher education". If people need it, if it is so important, well they will buy it, so we don't need to worry about it. Let the private sector take care of it, but one has to realize that if we take that attitude there are very important educational goods that the market cannot possibly deliver. Let me just mention three. 

The market will never deliver basic sciences, because there is no money to be made in teaching basic sciences. And yet basic sciences are so crucial to all learning. The market also will not deliver the humanities. The market will not deliver the study of humanities or the study of values. There is not much profit in doing that and extremely important the market will not provide access for the disadvantaged in society and to allow higher education to play its key role of being really a vehicle of upward social mobility in society. So the point, as that we make in our report, is that there is a role for the public sector in higher education. There are many different roles, but we have to understand that this easy tendency to sort of pass the ball, hand it over to the private sector has only limited possibilities. This by the way is no way to deny the very important role that the private sector plays in higher education. All I am saying is that the role is limited, and of course when I talk about private universities, I am not talking about something like The Aga Khan University which is a philanthropic institution and therefore is a subsidized institution, and in that sense no different from a state subsidized institution. So we go from the important issue of the public interest to the next subject and that is that it is very important for countries to develop a rational national system of higher education. We should think not of specific institutions, but somewhere people should think of what the whole system of higher education looks like. It should include every thing. It should include research universities, vocational school, private, profit institutions, large state schools and teachers' colleges. Somewhere there has to be an overall view of a system, a rational system of higher education. This system should be supervised but not controlled by some regulatory groups. It should be stratified. Not every university can become or should be a research university. Not every vocational school should move up to some other level. There are clear roles that should be explained to the systems and the students within the system, and it is also possible that perhaps one should have system wide resources we talk in our report of learning comments. For example it would be perfectly reasonable to set up computer laboratories or library throughout the system. The best example of a rational system is probably the American State of California. I am sure that there are some of you here who are familiar with it. The University of California has about ten campuses perhaps a state university system with some institutions that are less research oriented but still for example provide doctoral training, then a whole slew of colleges and this is a rational system that works quite well. The third subject we turned to is the subject of governance of higher education and it is interesting that there is no subject that we turn to for which people in different parts of the worlds we talked to did not say that it was the key problem for higher education in the developing world. I can give you many examples I can give you examples of Pakistan although I heard enough yesterday in Lahore to believe that it is a serious problem here as well. In Indonesia you have (where David Bloom and I worked some years ago) a very incompetent university administrators appointed by the central government without any reference to experience. You have a lot of corruption. If you look at the universities of Africa you come to the conclusion, for example, particularly in the former British colonies, that they started out by having had some really very fine institutions eg. Makarari University. If you look at these institutions today they have really sunk unfortunately to a very low level and governance has a lot to do with it. And so we developed a series of principles for governance, the parameters for managements of institutions of higher education, we talked about academic freedom, shared governance, accountability, selection of students and we also try and explain why the business mode that we are often urged is not really appropriate for universities. We appreciate the efficacy that the private sector produces but while we have to be efficient, we have to develop our own ways to be efficient and we cannot do it quite the way business does it. Somebody told me not long ago that the word efficiency does not occur in the Bible. That does not mean that efficiency is a bad thing but does mean that it has to be adopted for the circumstances. We turn to the causal topic of science and technology and for that I will say nothing because I will ask my colleague, Dr. Bloom to mention that.

The last topic we talk on (and it may be the most unusual) is the topic of general education and the plea for general education, for liberal education in universities in the developing world. What it is? General education focuses on imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual abilities in students, and there is an argument against the early and highly over developed specialization that is found in universities across the developing world. It focuses on the whole development of an individual, apart of the occupational training, in other words not just training the physician, or a nurse, or a lawyer but also training the person behind that specialist in order to give that particular specialization the kind of background that it needs. Each country needs to develop its own vision of what an educated person is, and doing that is in itself an exercise of very great value. You cannot take the conception that exists in France, Britain and Pakistan but you can develop a Pakistani conception of what an educated person is, and develop a general education curriculum on that basis. General education of the kind that we are talking about is not for everybody. It should be for the most talented. It emphasises flexibility, life-long learning. I am sure that all of you realize that in living in the middle of a knowledge revaluation, if education consists of cramming down facts then that is not a very good way of doing it, because a lot of these facts are going to be irrelevant in a decade or perhaps even less. But what you want is a people who are trained to learn, people whose minds remain flexible, who can absorb new information, and perhaps even change careers as happens a great deal these days. It's also true that the labor market values people with this kind of training a great deal because from the point of view of an employer they also deliver the same in very rapidly changing situations and it is very good for them to have people both with an education that stresses different aspects of learning values and other things of that kind. This evening I may have a chance to tell you some more about that specific issue but I can tell you that all over the world there is a growing interest in general education. The National University of Singapore just recently started a university scholar program which is essentially a college within the National University of Singapore that stresses this kind of education because they are convinced that the transition to the 21st Century really requires this kind of training for their top students. In many countries that have the sort of British tradition there is a feeling that the secondary schools can do a good deal of this, why do this at the university level? There are just two points I wish to make about that. One is that often a secondary school student is too immature really to appreciate the subtleties of the general education, but the second point is that not every body can go to the very few fine secondary schools that do some of this. If it is relegated to secondary schools you cut off an important ladder of social mobility which would exist if you offer this kind of education in universities 

Our reports states and believes that higher education has an important role to play in polarity elimination. It is needed to prevent national demoralisation in a knowledge intensive globalized world. The issue is not primary and secondary education but better higher education. A very important point to make is that this is not a zero some game. We recognize that the support is required for primary and secondary education but we want to bring higher education to a level that prevents this national margnization. Higher education benefits all segments of society directly and indirectly and perhaps indirectly even more so than directly and our position is in the sense of providing opportunities for the most able to make a maximum of which they are capable. And that helps all of society.