The pass percentage of this year's Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) and equivalent exams has improved from last year’s 69.60 to 74.70 per cent. The number of GPA-5 achievers has also showed an increasing trend, from last year’s 42,894 students to 58,276 students this year. Despite all these positive indicators, we cannot, however, leave aside the debate whether quality of education is actually increasing in the country, because in the ultimate analysis it is the quality that matters and quantity of anything of poor quality often turns out to be a burden and unproductive. However, the students who have scored fairly well, that is, those students who have got a score of GPA-3.5 and above should get a chance of obtaining education from the universities of the country. But as the number of seats in the public universities is limited, a large number of students will go to poor quality private universities for education spending large sums of money. Those who do not have enough money, they will have to give up their hope or end up getting admitted to colleges affiliated to the National University. But if the country had at least one public university in each district, the poor but meritorious students of the relevant district could hope for winning a seat in that university, as one hardly expects a Barguna student would go to Thakurgaon to vie for a seat. The government has time and again told us that it would establish one public university in each district. But we have not seen sufficient seriousness in this regard. Even this year’s budget allocation for education is still not much and does not reflect the aim of establishing one university in each district. However, it would be not very intelligent to suppose, from the increasing pass percentage and GPA-5 scorers, that the country's overall standard of education has risen. Dhaka Board’s highest number of GPA 5 achievers this year, for example, has been attributed to the fact that the best educational institutions exit in this division. Moreover, every year all leading schools and colleges are either cadet colleges or institutions located in urban areas. This is not desirable.
If the country wants to get back the past trends when villages competed with the very best colleges under an education board, the trend of private coaching (exclusively an urban advantage) has to be stopped and colleges in the village areas be provided with better teachers and teaching equipment. In this day’s of ever widening network of internet and increasing coverage of electricity the country should now seriously try for balanced development of each sector including education.