An Essay on
The Higher Education Sector in Bangladesh:
In Need of an Overhaul

Submitted to
Mr. Bijoy Lal Basu
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Dhaka

Submitted by
Ayman Rahman, Roll No. 29
Section A
21st Batch, BBA
Institute of Business Administration,
University of Dhaka

It doesn’t matter from what perspective one tries to see the importance of higher education, one thing is certain that its importance can never be undermined. But it is very disappointing that, in Bangladesh, the so called “Higher Education” is in no way up to the standard one expects it to be. This is the result of decades of ignorance and unplanned decisions. So it can’t be solved overnight. It will take a huge amount of positive thinking, planning and executions of these plans to see some real improvements.

The first step to improve the quality of higher education in Bangladesh is to know its present state, and that can never be done just by asking a few teachers about it or reading a few articles on newspapers and magazines. By all means it is a much more complex job and deserves delicate and careful handling. Until one can find out the root cause, any proposal for remedy seems useless.

The prime factors on which the quality of education in general depends are the quality of teachers, the quality of students and the quality of the teaching courses. The other factors are the academic environment and teaching aides (including library, communication facilities etc). But that being said, access to higher education is the most important piece of the puzzle. Because of limited number of seats in public universities, and high tuition fees charged by the private universities, access to university education is rather limited in Bangladesh.

Degree colleges that account for the lion’s share of enrolment at the higher level of education in Bangladesh,