33,000 students tested: government moves to block unaccredited IT degrees

The government has ordered work on a mechanism to identify unaccredited IT institutions and stop admissions to programmes that lack accreditation, after a skills assessment covering more than 33,000 students from 188 institutions.

Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Establishment Senator Ahad Cheema chaired the meeting, attended by the Ministry of Information Technology, the Higher Education Commission, the National Computing Education Accreditation Council and the Pakistan Software Houses Association.

The finding that prompted it

The assessment turned up a gap in both directions. Students are passing their degrees and failing the skills test. Students are also passing the skills test without completing a degree.

That is a clean statement of what employers in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad have said for years: the degree and the skill have come apart. A BSCS from an unaccredited programme is a receipt, not a qualification, and the assessment now puts a number on how often that is true.

What was ordered

Four directives came out of the meeting:

1. Build a mechanism to identify unaccredited IT institutions.
2. Prevent admissions to programmes that lack accreditation.
3. Give prospective students reliable information on accreditation status before they apply.
4. Prepare comprehensive institutional performance reports and examine the discrepancies between academic qualifications and practical competence.

The minister also directed that the assessment framework be aligned with international standards and the evolving requirements of the technology industry.

What this means if you are about to apply

Check accreditation before you pay a fee, not after. The National Computing Education Accreditation Council publishes the list of accredited computing programmes, and it is programme-level, not university-level. A university can hold accreditation for one degree and not another, and the campus matters too: a programme accredited at a main campus is not automatically accredited at a sub-campus.

The third directive above exists because that information is currently hard for a student to find. Until it is easy, ask the department for its NCEAC accreditation letter and the years it covers, in writing.

If you already hold the degree

The policy is aimed at admissions, not at revoking degrees already awarded. The practical risk for a current graduate is different: employers and foreign universities increasingly check accreditation status when they evaluate a transcript, and a skills assessment result is becoming a separate credential from the degree itself.

For anyone working in IT outside a salaried job, the tax position is its own subject. Export of IT services has a distinct regime, and our freelancer tax calculator works out what you owe on foreign-sourced income. If you are salaried, the income tax calculator runs the 2026-27 slabs.