Letters to the editor
Rating privately offered higher education
Sir,
Going through the pages of a newspaper these days in Bangladesh, a reader is likely to frequently come across advertisements of a new university set up somewhere in Dhaka or in the other big cities. But higher education is not only about quantity. More important or crucial is its quality. And it is in respect of this quality factor that the privately run centres of higher education are found to be seriously deficient in many cases.
The major requirement seems to be the formation, as swiftly as possible, an accreditation council for rating privately offered higher education and the findings of the work of such a council should be made public. Such a step will accomplish several things. First of all, the students and their guardians will know about the standard of the private universities as each of them is graded in order of performance like A, B, C, D and so on.
The ranking will help them to decide whether to take admissions in such universities or not. The rankings will be a guide to employers about the relative worth of the certificates of private universities . More significantly, the establishment of the accreditation council and its move to rank the universities according to performance will put the pressure on their management to go all-out to improve standard to get a good ranking to be able to remain in business. Besides, such a council, after it will be set up, should aim to identify the deficient universities and tell their management to meet standards within a specified time-frame or lose their licenses to operate.
Furthermore, the accreditation council should also examine whether so many private universities are necessary that only offer courses mainly on business administration or the humanities. If there has been an excess of such institutions, then it should recommend no further growth of them in the future and the recommendation will have to be enforced.
The proposed accreditation council will be expected to watch over the affairs of all the universities. But it will be expected to be absolutely uncompromising in relation to its monitoring and enforcement work in relation to the few specialised centres of higher learning that have opened shop including the private medical colleges. Reportedly, it is possible to get medical degrees from these colleges without actually going through practical work on anatomy courses such as dissection and operations. Similar inadequacies also reportedly exist in the other areas of the courses of such medical colleges.
Higher education in Bangladesh suffers from many lapse and there are many unfulfilled needs in this sector. But above everything, it is imperative to ensure the standard of higher education and to this aspect the government must concentrate its energies.
