The Geography of a Degree
What 404,436 M.Phil and Ph.D holders tell us about the landscape of higher education — and about the country that produced them A data-driven analysis of the Population & Housing Census 2023, covering all 136 districts of Pakistan. Somewhere in the enumeration books of the 2023 census, 404,436 people told an enumerator that the highest qualification they held was an M.Phil or a Ph.D. They are a very small group. Pakistan has 118.8 million people aged twenty and above; the advanced-degree holders among them work out to one person in every 294, or 341 for every 100,000 adults. That number is worth pausing on, because it is easy to read it either too gloomily or too cheerfully. Read one way, it is a scandal: a country of 241 million has fewer people with a research degree than live in Sargodha city. Read another way, it is an achievement: two decades ago that figure would have been a fraction of what it is now, and among Pakistanis in their late twentie...