Identifying Critical Success Factors of HEC Scholarship Projects: A Qualitative Study

The study aimed to identify critical success factors of HEC’s financial assistance and scholarship projects. Financial support plays a vital role in contending difficulties of higher education access. Lack of resources prevents talented youth from realizing their potentials in getting higher education. The government of Pakistan acknowledges such constraints and has allocated multi million budget for need based scholarship for Higher Education Commission. The scholarship projects support financially disadvantaged students with the aim to elevate the financial status of the students by enabling chances to get them enrolled in universities for better future. Most of the scholarship projects launched under the HRD Division completed but faced time extension and funds shortage barriers. There is very limited research available on the CSF of scholarship projects of HRD. Having dynamic capabilities theory as the theoretical point of departure, CSF were identified through qualitative nature of study by conducting interviews of responsible officials of the HEC, Islamabad, Pakistan. The research adopts single exploratory case study approach for the analysis the cases of 5 need based projects of the HEC. The study utilized data collected from eighteen in depth face to face interviews conducted from project heads, project managers, implementing partner university officials, and beneficiary students. The collected data were analyzed by using various qualitative techniques for the validation of numerous themes of the study. The techniques include coding nodes, word tree, word tag clouds and tree map. The results from the current study extended literature relevant to the CSFs of the HRD projects. The study found overall 16 CSFs of NBS projects spread over five stages of dynamic capability. in launching, twelve CSFs during implementation phase and six CSFs in post execution stage. General recommendations on the basis of conclusion and discussion, were presented for successful launch, implementation and post execution of the HRD projects of HEC.