Private Universities 2

As I said in the last post, the private universities in Bangladesh are viewed with some suspicion. The reasons for this are many. It is rare to ever find anything positive reported about them in the press. Bangladesh is a conservative country and anything new is highly suspect. The established universities are revered and have a firm grip on educational discourse. Many of the private universities are not very good - and so it goes. Every now and then something approaching reason is uttered but generally the private universities are not held in high regard.

Every year Bangladesh has around 350 000 (3.5 lakhs) sitting for the HSC, the culmination of the high school system. 250 000 of these compete for 24 051 seats in the public universities, with GPAs over 3.00. The National University, a multi-campus school of last resort, seems to mop up the other 100 000 candidates. Not to put too finer a point on this - the present system is designed to fail although it was designed to ensure a high degree of selectivity with only the creme de le creme reaching university. This may have worked in the 1940s to 1960s but since then the social conditions of Bangladesh have changed and a whole new aspirational class has emerged, who like their counterparts elsewhere, expect to go on to university. The private universities came into place to meet this pent up demand.

Despite this expansion only 4% of Bangladeshis go to university. The present government is aware of the problems and has promised the implementation of a new education system across the board - from primary to tertiary education. One can only applaud this initiative but at the same time wonder where the money is going to come from. For example, university lecturers are paid appallingly low salaries leading to academics in the public universities working in one or two of the private universities in order to make ends meet. The improvement of salaries to a level equal to India would cost heaps of money. Again, to cut the story short, it make sense to develop a binary model of tertiary education in Bangladesh, where private and public universities co-exist. However, for this to happen there is also the need for oversight that is transparent and equitable - something I will take up in my next post.