Talking recently to my nephew about his studies, I realised that the issues I had faced as a student in my day have not changed much. In fact, some of those issues now stand institutionalised. The social disparity I saw back in time was more of an individual thing. That is no more the case today.
Most of my college peers belonged to upper and upper-middle classes of the city. They had money to throw and vehicles to flaunt.
This left many of those from the middle and lower-middle classes to wonder why their families had failed to attain that level of commercial success. But life, for sure, went on smoothly because in the eyes of the college administration, this disparity meant nothing. All students were treated without any visible bias.
Today, things seem to have changed for the worse, with institutions and respective administrations not only acknowledging this disparity, but also taking sides. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to guess which social class they are biased towards.
As narrated by my nephew, his admission to an institution of choice required him to pay a certain amount upfront just to ‘secure’ his seat. Merit alone, it appears, was not enough.
As things unfolded with the passage of time, institutions now clearly want to have students from families with money to spare. This price tag on merit is enough to kill the ambition among many of today’s young learners, leaving them disillusioned.
There is no doubt that the Constitution has guaranteed equal opportunities to all. But academic institutions seem to have converted this ‘guarantee’ into an equal opportunity for all of them to make money.
FARAZ NASEEM
KARACHI
