Untangling the HEC’s timeline Opinion May 9, 2021 All the problems of the higher education sector are being laid at the feet of the HEC management being pushed out before the end of its term, by means of another ill-advised and poorly thought through ordinance that will cut short the HEC chairman’s tenure from four years down to two. At this point, it is worth examining some of the most significant and enduring problems in higher education, their timelines and, if we can, their origins. The HEC is being accused of training and hiring too few PhDs to work at universities. Selecting, sending and training a single PhD can easily take five to six years. Given the length of this pipeline, the seeds of any problems on this count were sown at least five years earlier.