Ninety universities became 270 and the budget never moved

Second largest out-of-school population in the world

Muzamil opens the episode with a number he has repeated before and returns to often: 25 to 26 million children in Pakistan are out of school. “We have the second largest out of school children population in the world,” he says. The government’s own figures put education spending at 0.8% of GDP, against 2.5 to 3% in India and up to 5% in some other Asian economies. The stakes, in his telling, are compounding. Pakistan built its recent economic hopes on producing coders and freelancers, a strategy that made sense before large language models started writing code. Now that space is being disrupted too, just as computer science graduates were becoming the country’s default answer to the jobs question.

Muzamil frames the moment as a rare kind of luck disguised as danger. Past disruptions took Pakistan a decade or more to even notice. This one is visible in real time, on the same phones and feeds that carry everything else, which means there is still a window to prepare, in robotics, energy systems, food security, and climate adaptation, before the window closes. He even brings the horizon closer to home: asking around about where jobs will exist by 2050, for his own five-year-old son, the answer he keeps getting back is space exploration and asteroid mining, a horizon he admits Pakistan isn’t thinking about at all, while the medium-term fields, the ones that matter for the next decade, are the real subject of this conversation.

That framing is why Muzamil brought on Dr. Habib Bokhari, a career academic who has spent decades inside Pakistan’s university system and has watched it try, and largely fail, to plan for what comes next.

From a government school in Bahawalpur to Glasgow

Dr. Habib Bokhari describes his own path as almost a rebuttal to the idea that Pakistan’s public system produces nothing. He came up through government schools in Bahawalpur, at a time when those schools still had working laboratories for metalwork, woodwork, and electronics, the kind of hands-on training that built creative and critical thinking. From there it was Government College Lahore, then Quaid-i-Azam University for a master’s and MPhil in biotechnology and biochemistry, then a government job, then a Commonwealth Scholarship that took him to the University of Glasgow for his PhD.

His doctoral work was on pertussis, whooping cough, chosen deliberately because no one in Pakistan was researching it at the time. A Commonwealth Fellowship later brought him to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he worked on diarrheal disease and on glyco-engineering, using microorganisms as factories to synthesize molecules now reshaping medicine. A Fulbright fellowship and teaching stints at American universities followed. Through all of it he stayed tied to COMSATS, where he has now spent close to 24 years and had a hand in building a university from the ground up.

Asked why academics chase multiple postdocs and fellowships, Dr. Habib Bokhari ties it directly to how tightly Western education systems are wired into industry and research. Every four or five years he sought a sabbatical or a fellowship abroad, not for prestige alone, but because staying current meant staying exposed to systems that were moving faster than Pakistan’s. That habit, he says, is what let him keep broadening from a narrow specialty into someone who could later help design a whole university.

Ninety universities became 270, and the budget never moved

Asked to diagnose Pakistan’s higher education system, Dr. Habib Bokhari goes straight to a number. “When I joined COMSATS in 2002-2003, there were ninety universities in Pakistan. Now I look and there are 270. But the budget has stayed roughly the same.” Higher education, he says, has three obligations: accessibility, quality, and relevance. Pakistan chased accessibility by multiplying institutions, but without new money behind them, quality was the part that gave way.

His fix is not simply “spend more,” though he wants that too. It is to concentrate resources: pick a handful of provincial centers of excellence and convert them into genuine research universities, the way the UK’s Russell Group or the US Ivy League function, with heavy funding tied to a working pipeline from invention disclosure to patent filing to commercialized product to startup. He sketches the scale of what that pipeline produces elsewhere, tens of billions in R&D spending feeding thousands of patents a year, a meaningful share of which become companies. Pakistan, over 25 years, has produced a few thousand startups in total. The US and UK each produce thousands in a single year. Part of the gap is simply scale, Pakistan has two to two and a half million students in higher education against 30 to 35 million in the US and roughly 40 million in China, but Dr. Habib Bokhari insists the raw material, “amazing youth, amazing brain,” is already there. What is missing is the system around it.

Five years of amazing youth, no outcome

Muzamil pushes back with visible frustration. He has spent five years hearing the same line, that Pakistan has amazing youth and amazing brainpower, without seeing it convert into outcomes. He wonders aloud whether government is even the right lever: a system with this many actors and this many competing interests may be structurally incapable of holding a 10 to 20 year vision, because everyone wants a return now, and education does not pay out that fast. The comparison he reaches for is blunt. India spends more than $100 billion a year on education, with roughly seven times Pakistan’s population and ten times its economy. Pakistan spends $4 to 5 billion, a twentieth of India’s total, when proportionally it should be closer to $10 to 20 billion.

He brings the argument down to a single family. Working-class parents who migrated from rural areas to cities over the past two or three decades often carry one dream for their children: a public school, then hopefully a government university seat. But seats are scarce, roughly 20 out of every 100 applicants get in. Of the rest, Muzamil asks pointedly, “are they condemned, are they doomed to blue collar, low value work for the rest of their lives,” repeating across generations, unless some private-sector, AI-enabled alternative can upskill them at scale, cheaply, and well. He also floats a theory about who can actually move the needle: not government, which he thinks may be structurally too slow, but people like himself and Dr. Habib Bokhari, a private sector and third-party push that builds demand from below by putting real success stories in front of families who are still only dreaming about what education could do for their children.

Degree plus: skills alongside the paper

Dr. Habib Bokhari’s answer starts with a sector most policy conversations skip: small and medium enterprises, which generate roughly 40% of Pakistan’s non-agricultural GDP and 78% of its non-agricultural workforce, largely staffed by people with limited formal education. Train that population in practical, short-cycle skills, he argues, hybrid models that reach rural and remote students without requiring a full campus, and Pakistan effectively builds its own version of a gig economy anchored in real trades rather than credentials alone. He points to government matric-level technical courses as a starting template.

The underlying philosophy is what he calls degree-plus. “You need a skill, you need a system, and that’s all,” he says, describing how little formal schooling some specialized industrial roles actually require once the right training pipeline exists. He holds up Singapore as the model of a small country that plans its workforce the way a genome plans an organism, deciding in advance what percentage of people it needs in which sector, then investing to match. That discipline, not a bigger population or bigger GDP, is what turned Singapore into one of the world’s top innovation economies.

The trillion-dollar bio-economy hiding in Pakistan’s labs

Dr. Habib Bokhari’s own field gives him a specific way of describing the opportunity. DNA, he says, is a 3.5-billion-year-old blueprint that the West has spent decades mining for biofuels, biomedicine, and pharmaceuticals, an industry now worth trillions of dollars globally, built on synthetic biology and AI-driven optimization of biological processes. Pakistan has barely entered that field, despite having the underlying biodiversity and, in his telling, the talent.

He argues the way to prioritize is to look twenty years out and treat coming threats as a task list. Antimicrobial resistance, he notes, is projected to cause roughly ten million deaths and $100 trillion in losses globally in the coming years, a slow-moving crisis that bioinformatics, paired with industry investment, could get ahead of. Robotics, engineering, cybersecurity, climate-resilient crops, and food security round out his list. Pakistan, he points out, has absorbed roughly 150 extreme weather shocks over the past 10 to 15 years, costing close to 1.7% of GDP, while global development goals rank decent work, climate action, and sustainable consumption as top priorities in that order. Training a workforce against that list, rather than against yesterday’s job titles, is what he means by relevance. He recalls bringing village children into his university laboratory and watching them light up at facilities they didn’t know existed in Pakistan, a small act he thinks needs to happen far more often if rural, public-school kids are ever going to see themselves in these fields.

Why he came back, and what 2050 looks like

Closing the conversation, Muzamil asks the personal question underneath all the policy: why stay in Pakistan when opportunities, and nationality, were available abroad. Dr. Habib Bokhari confirms the option was real, at the time a postdoc position abroad could convert into nationality within a couple of years, for him and his children both. He didn’t take it. What kept him was simpler than career logic. “This country gave us so much, shaped us, and then there’s the bond with family, with parents. That was what brought me back,” he says. He now channels that back into advisory roles, he describes serving on Gates Foundation-linked antimicrobial resistance work in Africa, sitting on the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission’s alumni panel, holding a board of trustees seat at the Pakistan Science Foundation, and working as a Fulbright evaluator alongside USEFP and the British Council. He calls it reaching “the highest position that was possible in my cadre,” a line delivered without much drama, more accounting than boast.

On his own children, he doesn’t pressure them to return, but he is candid about the hope underneath that hands-off stance. “When they become skilled enough, if they can still deliver for the country, nothing is better than that,” he says. Asked to project Pakistan to 2050, he doesn’t offer a forecast so much as a disposition: challenges have been constant for the 20-plus years he has been watching, and “adapting to those challenges, surviving with those challenges, that’s also a top skill.” He treats that adaptability, more than any single policy fix, as the trait that will decide the outcome.

Teachers with a bigger following than any politician

The episode closes on an aside that Dr. Habib Bokhari and Muzamil both land on independently: the shifting shape of influence in Pakistani education. Dr. Habib Bokhari recalls teachers who once drew crowds of students on bicycles to informal tuition sessions, a real if small-scale fan following built purely on being good at explaining things. Muzamil picks up the same thread, noting that today’s teachers and educators on social media command audiences far larger than that generation of tuition instructors ever did, and could, if they chose, use that reach to push the same demand-side shift Muzamil described earlier, convincing ordinary families that education pays off, one success story at a time.

It is a smaller note to end on, but it fits the episode’s throughline. Neither Muzamil nor Dr. Habib Bokhari treats government failure as the end of the story. Both keep circling back to what individuals, teachers, families, entrepreneurs, can do while waiting for the system above them to catch up.