Zia Khan

Early life and background

Khan was born in Sialkot, in an army garrison. He has said he came from an army background. His family moved to Karachi in 1970 after his father was transferred. [1]

Khan says the fall of Dhaka in 1971 compelled him to think that they had to find out what was wrong with themselves. As a boy, he wanted to become a general. [1]

Education

Khan could not find admission after intermediate. He joined a Pakistan-wide institute that trains cost accountants. He completed an MA in Economics so that he would have 16 years of schooling. [1]

In 1987 Khan moved to the United States, to Arizona State University. He enrolled in five programmes at the university at the same time. They were an MBA, an MS in Engineering, a Master of Accountancy, CPA and CMA. He says his aim was to connect economics, business management and technology. [1]

Khan says he was an employee of Arizona State University for about five and a half years, as a teaching assistant. He also says he is a computer science graduate of FAST. [1]

Career

Khan says he had come to know that nothing could be done without technology. He registered a company of his own and sponsored his own H1 visa. He set up his own company in 1999. [1]

He moved from hardware to software, concluding that software was the way forward. He has said he realised Java would become very big once it appeared. Khan says he came to Pakistan in October. [1]

Operation Badar

Khan took a plan to Dr Arif Alvi to make the programme a national initiative under the president. He says the movement he is still running is called Operation Badar. He refers to a statement made after Badr that captives who taught the children would be freed. [1]

Khan says that after he began teaching, thousands of students began to attend. He taught in Quetta and in Lahore. He says classes were free at one place and cost 1000 rupees elsewhere. [1]

He says they set the fee at 1000 rupees a month so that anybody, or most people, could afford it. They generated their funding from the public, he says, and he and the President engaged a welfare trust to collect the fees on their behalf. He describes this as a private initiative of his and of the President. He says he has spent the last 25 years on the solution. [1]

Khan says students stopped studying after 9/11, because they thought green cards and visas would no longer be available. He says American companies were not giving work to Pakistani companies. He also says Upwork, or its precursor, and Fiverr did not exist in that period. [1]

The programme

Khan says the current programme runs for 15 months. Students first train on Web 2 for two quarters, and then choose one of four specialisations. He says he wrote a new syllabus covering Web3 and the Metaverse. [1]

He says classes of two hours, from 8 to 10, are held on Zoom on Mondays and Saturdays. They offer 16 to 18 credit hours for 1000 rupees, and he says automation makes the low fee possible. [1]

Khan says about 50% of students drop out in the first quarter, and that dropouts are the biggest problem even for on-site classes. He says that when dropouts rose further, he understood that it was not going to work. The President asked him to find a way to reduce dropouts. Khan says he is responsible for the dropout problem and does not blame anyone else. He says about 10,000 people have either graduated or are in the final quarter. [1]

Khan says he has not been able to attract women to his programme, and that women have never exceeded 10% of his students. He says many women go into medicine but few enter computer science. [1]

He says he removes students from class if they are not earning dollars in the international market. Alumni are emailed and asked to fill in a form, he says, and they have built studios and are recording videos of the alumni. [1]

Khan says a gathering of 40,000 people at Karachi's cricket stadium generated hype that raised admissions at other universities. He says that for security reasons he does not want to call 40,000 people to a stadium. He says the objective was to get the message out. [1]

Teaching

Khan teaches two classes of about 800 students each on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. He teaches at Air University in Islamabad on Saturdays and at an institution in Lahore on Sundays. He teaches at an institution in Peshawar on Fridays. [1]

A FAST director asked Khan to come and teach at FAST. He says only four or five of the 40 students he taught at FAST could program. He says teachers carry the most responsibility for education problems, though students share it. [1]

Views on education

Khan says the biggest problem for Pakistani students is motivation, and that many graduates know theory but cannot do practical work. He says Pakistan should have a centralised examination system for universities. He says about 25,000 students graduate in computer science each year from around 100 universities in Pakistan, while 1,500 to 2,500 get jobs. [1]

Khan says that when HEC issued a mandate, PhDs and master's degree holders were brought in first. He says faculty should have been filtered and that a PhD alone is not enough. He says private universities face strong pressure to generate revenue and that public-sector teachers are not well paid. [1]

He says MQM-type problems badly damaged Karachi's education system. He says Musharraf funded universities, but most of that funding was wasted. He says Pakistan should move toward the American state university model, and that Pakistan will be no more if it does not focus on education. [1]

Views on technology and work

Khan says the Metaverse is the 3D internet. He says teaching only the most state-of-the-art technology would leave students unable to get jobs, and that he would teach with Next.js rather than PHP. He says that by making templates they began earning about 5 dollars a day at the start. [1]

He says the 30 billion dollars now coming in are being sent by Pakistanis, and that the top priority should be bringing dollars into Pakistan. He says IT skills are useful anywhere, not only in Pakistan. He also says jobs are hard to find in most fields abroad, except IT. [1]

Khan says a leader should also be highly technical, and that to get results in Pakistan a leader has to be a politician. He says to make a small prototype and test it, and that startups should be small, in effect micro startups. [1]

Personal life

Khan says he began to disintegrate emotionally. He says some costs were being charged to his credit cards. [1]

Timeline

1970

Khan's family moved to Karachi after his father was transferred.[1]

1971

The fall of Dhaka compelled Khan to think about what was wrong with themselves, in his words.[1]

1987

Khan moved to the United States, to Arizona State University.[1]

1999

Khan set up his own company.[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Pakistan's universities are producing toilet paper degrees . Thought Behind Things , 2023-04-17.