It’s a pretty small sample to generalize.
When NUST was in its infancy or probably on the drawing board, CAE was head and shoulders above other engineering schools in the country. The faculty comprised of young PhDs brimming with ideas and desire to make a difference. Every semester or other the whole curriculum was revised to keep pace with the cutting edge developments in the field. e.g. when Pentium chips were just introduced, undergrad students were learning machine programming 486s. The school was a cut above the rest because the graduation criteria was to successfully complete an individual project; with many a projects coming straight from the service’s own real-world requirement. This was a make or break requirement as all your academics stood for nought if you were not successful in the project. Even those academics were based on grading curve so you essentially had an up or out weeding out happening throughout the years with 20 to even 50 percent attrition not unheard of.
Compared to other schools in the country, you had access to better resources and it showed. Undergrad students projects included working prototypes of Airborne Infrared Search and Track Systems, missile guidance, neural networks (at undergrad level at a time very few had even heard of the AI/ML). Similarly doing finite element analysis and wind tunnel testing of various conformal fuel tank configurations were also undergraduate projects.
Obviously you have a continuum of performance among the graduates but the best could compete with the very best in the world. With a very small size, the ratio of graduates ending up at every top school (your MITs, Stanfords and the like) is fairly high. There are challenges certainly but many of those are systemic and endemic to our secondary school education system and service careers and hierarchy; Yet to summarily dismiss an institution, that is a national treasure in my view, based on a small sample size is too harsh a judgement.
