The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has officially transitioned its degree attestation process to a completely paperless, online system. Students across Pakistan can now verify their credentials without visiting HEC regional centers or relying on courier services for document submission.
The shift aims to dismantle the bureaucratic bottleneck that previously forced graduates to wait weeks sometimes months for physical verification. Under the new protocol, applicants upload scanned copies of their degrees and transcripts to the HEC portal.
Once the system verifies the data against the university’s internal records, the attested documents are issued digitally. “We’ve removed the physical barrier,” an HEC spokesperson said, noting that the move is designed to curb the rampant issue of fake degrees while easing the burden on overseas Pakistanis. For years, the attestation process was a notorious point of frustration.
Students often spent entire days in queues at centers in Islamabad, Lahore, or Karachi, only to be turned away for minor clerical errors. Now, the commission says the process is tethered directly to the universities’ own databases.
If a university has digitized its records, the HEC’s system pulls that data instantly, bypassing the need for manual cross-referencing. However, the system isn’t without its growing pains. Several students have already reported technical glitches during the document upload phase, particularly when trying to sync records from older, non-digitized institutions.
HEC officials acknowledge that the transition relies heavily on how quickly individual universities update their own digital archives.
The economic impact is also significant. By cutting out courier fees and the hidden costs of travel for students living in remote districts, the HEC claims the new system will save graduates millions of rupees annually. Despite the automation, the commission maintains that security remains the priority.
The digital certificates will feature encrypted QR codes, allowing employers and foreign universities to verify the authenticity of a degree in seconds.
For the thousands of graduates currently caught in the backlog, the shift represents a much-needed modernization. Whether the digital infrastructure can withstand the surge in daily traffic, however, remains the true test for the commission’s IT department.
