ANALYSIS OF GENERAL EDUCATION COURSES AND LIFE-SKILLS DEVELOPMENT IN PAKISTAN HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE PERSPECTIVES OF THE UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION POLICY 2023

Pakistan's higher education sector entered a transformative phase in 2023 when the Higher Education Commission (HEC) notified the Undergraduate Education Policy (UEP) 2023, making General Education courses a compulsory component of every bachelor's and associate degree programmed across the country from Fall 2024 onward. Unlike the narrow, single discipline degrees that dominated Pakistani universities for decades, the new framework requires students to complete 30 credit hours of General Education spread across clusters such as Arts and Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences. This quantitative study examined the impact of these General Education courses on the development of life skills among 300 BS-level students drawn from public and private universities in Pakistan. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire and analyses using correlation and regression techniques. Findings indicate a strong positive correlation between General Education courses and life-skills development (r = 0.710, p < 0.001), with the regression model explaining 50.4% of the variance in students' life skills (R² = 0.504). Critical thinking, communication, problem-solving, emotional intelligence and teamwork all registered significant positive associations with General Education course exposure. The study confirms that the policy's provisions align with established life-skills frameworks and that implementation, when pedagogically well supported, can produce measurable gains in student competencies. Based on these findings, the study recommends that HEC and universities move beyond credit-hour compliance by defining measurable learning outcomes for General Education courses and establishing regular monitoring mechanisms to sustain and strengthen the policy's life-skills outcomes.