Tauseef Aized University education is one of the key factors for the economic growth of a state. Pakistan had only two universities at the time of independence but the figure rose to 44 along with 10 degree awarding institutions at the beginning of the 21st century. Out of those 44 universities, 31 belonged to the public sector which clearly manifested a lack of concern on the part of the successive governments as the nation needed a gigantic effort to build higher educational institutions. The last regime, however, addressed the issue and by the end of 2008, there were 94 universities and 30 degree awarding institutions. The figures seem healthy and encouraging but a more important indicator than merely the number of universities is the total number of student enrolment in the country. During 2001-02, the total number of students attending universities was 276,000 which rose to 741,000 during 2007-08. Though apparently encouraging but this merely constitute only 4 percent of the total population. Moreover, let us consider whether our higher education system is performing well. There are less than around 25 percent of the faculty members in our universities who hold doctoral degrees. That clearly means that we do not have qualified people who are imperative in order to build and smoothly run our institutions. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has endeavoured a lot during last many years to improve the faculty qualifications by providing generous foreign and local scholarships for PhD candidates. Some of the people who had been funded during the last several years have completed their PhDs successfully and are working, while many are still in the process. The government has provided through HEC huge sums for foreign PhD studies but this policy cannot generate healthy results in nutshell. Another issue of key importance is the selection of courses and establishing new departments. Our universities, in particular public sector, attempt to offer a wide range of programmes that has created a lot of similar programmes in different universities. Although this is not a bad policy altogether yet our university management system must consider building specialised departments in different universities, especially in pure and applied sciences. The next and perhaps the most important factor related to the efficiency is governance. Today, university management has become an established discipline but unfortunately, it is not visible in our institutions. The institutions, especially in the public sector, are lacking in efficiency and perform at a very low level in teaching and research. The sole reason is the old and outdated management style of running the affairs. The authorities must consider revamping the governance of the universities. Some good universities working in private sectors can also help other universities to improve their management for higher productivity. The writer is a professor at the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore and currently a research fellow at the Monash University, Australia E-mail: tauseef_aized@yahoo.com