Dr Qaisar Rashid
On August 30, British High Commissioner Jane Marriott chaired the ceremony of awarding 46 Chevening Scholarships to Pakistani mid-career professionals for the 2023-24 academic year in the field of social sciences. Almost half of them goes to civil servants, whereas the rest goes to other aspirants – to get a fully funded one-year Master’s degree in the United Kingdom (UK).
Chevening is the UK Government’s international scholarship program run as part of foreign policy objectives. Declared aims of the scholarship are access to some of the best quality education in the world, exclusive networking opportunities and the chance to explore the UK’s diverse culture, and then join the Chevening alumni club. A prerequisite is to secure an unconditional offer on a course run by three Chevening partner universities each. Fully funded includes tuition fees, living expenses and travel costs. Estimately, each such scholarship costs the UK Government around 20,000 GBP per student selected. A question is this: what is the purpose of this huge spending?
Within the domain of engaging civil servants, dozens of examples of misalignment between the educational backgrounds of applicants, degrees awarded, and career prospects of applicants as mid-career professionals exist. For example, a couple of years ago, a civil servant working in the Foreign Service was awarded a Chevening scholarship to study Global Economic Governance at the University of Oxford. The officer had an educational background of MA English, but no academic background of economy. The degree awarded was also not aligned with the future of the civil servant, who should have been given advanced knowledge in core disciplines such as international relations and law, though global governance could be remotely related.
Similarly, a civil servant working in In-land Revenue was awarded a Chevening scholarship to study Masters in Public Administration at the University of Warwick. The officer had an educational background of medicine (MBBS), but no academic background of public administration. The degree awarded was also not aligned with the future of the civil servant, who should have been given advanced knowledge in the field of income and corporate taxes, though public administration could be remotely related. Obviously, such admissions could not be secured by self-paying overseas Pakistani students.
In each case, fixed in a frame, the degree adorns the walls of the office of the civil servant who would keep on bragging about the achievement of studying at a renowned university, without revealing to an admiring listener that the slate of knowledge was still clean, as the degree was irrelevant to the core discipline of the career. For the Chevening scheme, the only thing relevant is to develop a network of indebted, gratified civil servants working in Pakistan. The scholarship is akin to baksheesh – a payment (such as a tip or bribe) to expedite services. The underlying purpose is to develop an obliged, loyal group of civil servants who could facilitate deep penetration into the system afterwards. Certainly, the scholarship scheme develops a network of grateful civil servants, who are tuned to watching the interests of the UK Government in Pakistan.
Another question is this: why is the UK Government concerned about the future of mid-career professionals (civil servants)? The answer is that spending GBP 20,000 per head to buy loyalties of strategically placed civil servants is not an unprofitable investment. If a self-paying overseas Pakistani student visits a government office of Pakistan complaining that a UK’s university has robbed him of his money by running a bogus course or by not delivering on promised contents of the course, no one listens to the complainant, as the scenario presently is.
Published on July 15 this year on the website of the House of Commons Library of UK Parliament, under the heading “Higher education in the UK: Systems, policy approaches, and challenges,” the UK Government’s International Education Strategy includes two declared ambitions: first, to increase the value of education exports to GBP 35 billion per year by the year 2030 (compared to GBP 31 billion in 2021-22); and second, to increase the total number of international students choosing to study in the UK’s higher education system each year to 600,000 by the year 2030.
It is like channelizing money from the pockets of self-paying overseas (Pakistani) students to the pockets of mid-career civil servants under scholarship schemes such as Chevening, which is part of the education export industry in sync with foreign policy objectives, offering no net economic loss to the UK Government.
The UK’s higher education offers two main challenges to self-paying overseas students. First, running rip-off (low-value) degree courses, and hence becoming instrumental in converting overseas students into asylum seekers. Second, breaking promises on the delivery of quality education and research in the middle of a course, and hence wasting time and money of overseas students. In the recent past, the UK Government launched crackdowns on the former, but not on the latter. The modus operandi adopted by the latter is that, in the middle of a postgraduate course, especially in life sciences and research, an excuse is extended that such and such facility (or research project) cannot be offered because either the university’s international office had mistakenly sent by post brochures having misprinted contents of a course to get the student enrolled or the international office made a commitment of delivery without consulting the department supposed to run the course. The best example using this ruse often is the University of Glasgow.
A question is this: How is it possible that a university’s departments do not know what is being promised in writing over the years on their behalf to self-paying overseas students to get them enrolled? On this question, the UK Government observes silence, which serves the purpose of meeting targets of the International Education Strategy ending 2030. Moreover, the UK Government’s preference is to subdue grumpy voices of self-paying international students by obliging civil servants of the same country through scholarship schemes such as Chevening.