It’s 2AM and Ali’s sitting on his window sill staring at the dead body in the middle of his street. Earlier in the day, the sound of children’s shoes scraping against gravel as they ran from wicket to wicket, desperate to score a run, bothered the elderly in the neighborhood who’d tut whilst reading their newspaper. They were unaware that it would be long before they would hear them play once more.
Across the region a few hours away sat Maira, watching her mother race from room to room packing up closets they had used for decades, a frantic look painted across her face. They had received notice for an illicit evacuation of their residence, commanding a shift to a place far away. Their actual home, the one that was quickly being emptied out, watched as hands that had drawn on its walls trembled whilst folding clothes.
While everyone was boasting their summer internship achievement, Aimal sat in front of a laptop he’d taken on loan from his neighbor. The flickering light bulb over his head wavered with the internet signals, and sweat trickled down his forehead as he watched the clock tick by. Unstable connections rendered the device useless for most part of the day, and his scholarship application was due within the hour. He sat and pondered how to convince a stranger to fund his education while his classmate changed the font on his Instagram story of Baku.
Sara was on the phone for the fourth time that day. Her father had taken a loan from a local business man who threatened to put him in jail if the money was not returned. She used her phone to look up banks that provided money on an urgent basis. Disappointed at yet another failed try, she opened her university portal and applied for a semester-off. The money will go to a better place.
Near the sea sat Mariam, who was at yet another protest. Electricity bills, unfair pay, congested traffic, robberies, murders… she had forgotten which one it was. She looked at the people around her; a nurse who’d sacrificed a day’s pay, a mazdoor who couldn’t afford his daughter’s school fees, and an activist whose eyes were swollen after the news of yet another species gone extinct. She wondered what her place in her institute really was, where their eyes scanned Powerpoint Presentations about the people sitting around her, but never actually saw them.
All the stories mentioned in this article are based on the lives of the author’s friends this past summer (names have been changed for privacy). Students in Pakistan have long juggled their desire for a bright future with the struggles of their present, and it has all gone unnoticed.
A 2023 study published in the Journal of Educational Research & Social Sciences Review (Saddique, Khurshid & Raja) surveyed 150 part-time-working students across three Pakistani public-sector universities. Among them, 63.3% said economic factors drove their decision to take a part-time job, while 36.7% said economic factors were not the reason. The same study found 56% of respondents were financing their own studies through this work, while 44% were not. Students found it difficult to balance their jobs with their education, but were obligated to in order to remain enrolled. Prospective employers often look at academic records without trying to see the person behind it – the one that missed a grade component because he had to work hours to send money back home.
University enrolment in Pakistan fell nearly 12% in three years – from 2.23 million in 2020-21 to 1.96 million in 2023-24 – a drop blamed partly on rising tuition fees and economic pressure on families, per the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26. Education, a basic fundamental right under the Constitution, is rapidly becoming ‘inaccessible’ as 56% of household incomes go to cover Pakistan’s total education financing, roughly PKR 2.8 trillion annually, exceeding government investment.
Furthermore, the income-cost gap is huge, with the average Pakistani household earning PKR 82,179, and a single year’s university tuition ranging from PKR 300,000 to 1.6million. Over 16,500 University of Karachi students defaulted on fee payments over four years, leaving Rs2.1 billion in outstanding dues – concrete evidence of students/families unable to keep up financially.
The problem also extends beyond financial circumstances. In a country that refuses to acknowledge mental health and its effects on young people, cases like Muhammad Awais Sultan’s will become fearingly common. A 22-year-old Pharm-D student at the University of Lahore, Awais tragically passed after falling from the third floor of his campus building. When students later tried to discuss academic pressure as a possible cause, they were reportedly told things like ‘he must have been going through something personal’ – a phrase that individualises the tragedy, empties it of context, and lets the institution move on with impunity. Within weeks, a second D-Pharmacy student at the same university survived a suicide attempt after falling from a campus building; police suspected domestic/relationship reasons in her case specifically, but it happened inside the same climate of institutional silence, and prompted the university to suspend on-campus classes.
Punjab University, one of the largest and oldest institutions of higher education in Pakistan, has a single counsellor for over 55,000 students. An investigation conducted by Express Tribune stated that 90% of Pakistani universities lack mental health professionals to support their students. Because there is no licensing body for therapists in the country, the quality of care will remain inconsistent even where it exists.
Pakistan’s suicide mortality rate climbed to 9.8 per 100,000 in 2022, with WHO estimates suggesting 50–55 deaths by suicide each day nationally, about 70% of them among people aged 15–29. A 2022 National Psychiatric Morbidity Survey found the lifetime prevalence of mental disorders in Pakistan at 37.91%. Attempted suicide was only decriminalized in Pakistan in 2022 (it had been a criminal offence under the Penal Code before that) – the legal change hasn’t translated into social attitude change; stigma remains extremely enduring, with suicide still widely treated as a moral or religious failing rather than a health crisis. Until Pakistani universities and the wider society continue to treat mental health as an individual crisis, disconnected from the social, cultural and economic determinants, students will continue to suffer in their attempt to build better futures for themselves and their families.
Most neglected are the students belonging to conflict-zones or overlooked regions. Frequent disturbances in the provinces of Balochistan & Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have disrupted education specifically at the secondary level, and particularly for girls. Upheavals in North Waziristan in 2014 disrupted schooling for an estimated 70,000 students; years later, only one of the region’s three colleges had reopened.
A study in Swat measured PTSD, depression, and anxiety in 712 secondary students displaced by the 2009 conflict there, using standardized clinical scales. It found high levels of all three, particularly among female students and those who had been out of school during displacement – and found PTSD and depression measurably dragged down academic achievement.
Ali, Maira, Aimal, Sara, and Mariam all look, on paper, like normal students. They go to class. They turn things in, mostly on time. What their transcripts won’t tell you is who’s covering a loan shark, who’s borrowing a laptop, who hasn’t slept properly in weeks, who’s watching their street empty out one family at a time.
Pakistan has no shortage of students willing to fight for their education. What it’s missing is anyone in a position of power actually noticing what that fight costs them.
