Universities help transform Human Minds to Human Capital
Where do people who join Politics, Judiciary, Bureaucracy, Armed Forces, and Business typically come from? Universities.
It stands to reason that the entity responsible for producing people that end up running key institutions in the country must have the highest responsibility for economic growth. If they encouraged positive competition, discouraged pointless plagiarism and useless research, and built-up capacity to open minds to possibilities for out-of-the-box thinking, then the country can quickly change its fate.
So yes, universities are responsible for the economic growth of a country. Let’s look at some of the main ways universities become responsible are:
- They Create a Quality Workforce
Gone are the days when you would learn a skill and then spend 30 years developing a career on its basis. Today, the average skill life is 6 years, meaning imparting a learning mindset is way more important than rote memorization. This is where universities play a key role via their impact on undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate programs as well as continuous learning departments offering short courses to help build up the capacity of the workforce. This ultimately helps to increase workforce productivity, boost output, and propel growth in the wider economy.
- It Propels Innovation
Where can people discuss ideas and engage in new ways of doing with minimal chances of financial or social loss? University. This is where solutions to national and global challenges can be discovered in healthcare, environmental protection, international development, population trends, and resource security. Many of the greatest advancements of recent years including self-driving cars, the internet, augmented reality and cloud computing were all born from research that took place at universities. Innovation, therefore, has high economic value, but they also enrich our health, and work and impacts us socially.
- Raises Economic Output
The wider economic benefits from the research and innovation undertaken at Universities that drives investment, both locally and globally, promote exports and make the economy more balanced. Such an environment that promotes research and inquiry-based mindset allows students to learn transferable skills that will help them succeed in the workplace, further strengthening the knowledge-based economy.
- It Enhances Employability
As the economy moves toward competency-based hiring, with its focus on skills and experience over pure academics and theory, graduates and established professionals need to be armed with the tools they need to find and succeed at work in Marketplace 5.0. This is where the role of universities is critical. They need to be proactive in arranging opportunities for current students to develop industry expertise through work experience and internships, made part of the academic curriculum.
- Upskilling Present Workforce
We talked about the shelf life of skills being reduced to 6 years; well, this applies to the existing workforce. The Universities must upskill them to prevent them from losing employment and being of value to the industry. For employers, this has a positive impact on productivity, output, and staff morale. It also helps companies to drive efficiency and thus profitability. Training adult learners is a massive undertaking that can produce tremendous outcomes, as they have strong knowledge of other areas, and with few more directed training, they can be of high value.
- It Supports Knowledge-Based Economy
With the population size of Pakistan, the most abundant resource is human capital. However, to make this into an asset and not a liability, Universities have a big role to play. As sources of advanced learning and new information from the research and innovative activities, universities train the workforce of tomorrow while supplementing the innovations of today. All economists agree that knowledge creation is a key driver of economic growth. This is due to greater efficiency in various forms. A highly skilled workforce requires less supervision, is more productive, and adds tremendous value.
Conclusion
Universities have a huge role in supporting economic development. Public Universities such as NUST and GCU are encouraging novel research and have strong policies in place for the holistic development of students with no tolerance for plagiarism and poor output research. While Private Universities such as Iqra University, Beaconhouse National University, University of Lahore and University of South Asia are taking the lead in proving that combining commercial value with innovation in academics and training is the key ahead!
