Sheikh Selim
Every admission season, the city fills with banners. They promise world standards, global recognition, international collaborations and a golden future, and they are paid for out of tuition collected from families who can ill afford to be misled. We believe those families deserve better than a billboard. We also believe the country deserves a serious conversation about what its private universities are for, who runs them and whether their celebrated achievements mean what their advertisements say they mean.
Why the Sector Exists
Let us begin by being fair. Private universities exist because the state could not meet demand. Public institutions cannot seat every qualified applicant, and the families who turned to private campuses were not fools. They wanted predictable academic sessions, instruction in English and closer ties with employers. Those are legitimate wants, and the sector, to some extent, has met them. Nothing that follows should be read as contempt for the students, teachers and administrators who work honestly within it. Our quarrel is with the system that surrounds them.
The Research Deficit
Research is the clearest test of whether an institution is truly a university or merely a teaching college with ambitions. Yet private universities, though legally nonprofit, live on tuition, which grows with enrollment, not discovery. Sensible managers therefore add students and cut costs.
Research pays slowly, if at all. Faculty carry heavy teaching loads on short contracts, laboratories are thin, doctoral programmes are rare, and teachers hurry between institutions to earn a living. Scholars without time to think cannot produce publications or impact.
Public universities hold no moral high ground here, and we will not flatter them. They possess the senior scholars, the older laboratories and the deeper archives, but they are weighed down by political interference, session delays, flat budgets and a culture in which accountability is a rumor. The contest between the two sectors is lopsided in a peculiar way. Private campuses win on service and schedule. Public ones still win on research reputation and depth (rarely evidenced or contested why). Neither offers the complete education a young person is entitled to expect.
Not every university needs to be a research university. A strong teaching institution aimed at skill-enhancement is a perfectly respectable thing to be. The fault lies in claiming research distinction while investing next to nothing in research.
The Ranking Illusion
In the latest QS table, 1,504 universities were ranked worldwide, and only thirteen were Bangladeshi. The leading private university lands in the 901-950 band, other private institutions fall between 1001 and 1200 or in the 1401-plus group, and most of the country’s universities are absent. Being listed is a modest achievement, and no careful reader should accept it as proof of educational excellence.
These tables weigh reputation surveys, employer opinion, citations, international ratios and graduate employment. Yet reputation surveys reward the already famous, and fame feeds itself. Employment figures can shine simply because a university admits students whose families hold the connections that produce jobs. International ratios can be inflated by recruitment drives that reveal nothing about classroom learning. None of these indicators shows whether a graduate can reason, write clearly or solve a problem she has never met before.
Below a certain position, universities are grouped in wide bands rather than fixed ranks. A celebrated jump may reflect a minor shift in a few scores, or merely the stumbling of others. A university can rise because the field around it fell. Economists call this Goodhart’s law, and every campus manager should frame it on the wall. Once a ranking becomes the goal, behaviour bends toward its indicators: citations are cultivated, surveys encouraged, foreign students recruited for the ratio. The score improves, but the learning may not.
Then there are paid star-rating audits, in which an institution pays to be assessed on its facilities and programmes. They are often advertised as independent rankings, and the difference is rarely explained to the families reading the poster. Applicants cannot observe teaching quality directly, so they rely on signals, and institutions have every incentive to manufacture favourable ones cheaply.
Privately hosted “excellence awards” work the same way, and they now appear constantly as targeted social media advertisements. If one approaches you, ask first why you, of all the genuine high achievers, would be rewarded. Many private universities in Bangladesh outsource their ranking achievements in the similar method, while fully knowing how the game is set up, and the social media advertising is often the only real achievement involved.
Rankings are not worthless. They can expose genuine deficiencies, and the weak showing of Bangladeshi universities, public and private alike, in research output and international collaboration is an honest warning worth heeding. But a thermometer is not a cure. When a ranking becomes the main advertising claim, it serves revenue before it serves learning.
Governance and the Culture of Patronage
The law requires a board of trustees, yet in too many private universities the board is little more than a family gathering with letterhead. Trustees shape the appointment of vice chancellors, treasurers and registrars. Budgets, fees and surpluses are settled in rooms faculty cannot enter. Relatives fill senior administrative posts, hiring runs on loyalty, and a teacher who disagrees with the owner soon learns what dissent costs. Those who deliver education have no power to hold accountable those who profit from it.
Founders deserve credit. Many supplied vision, capital and stubborn faith when the sector was a gamble. But founder authority is a loan against the institution’s future, repayable in rules. A mature university could survive the departure of its builder. Where the founder remains the institution, the institution has not yet been born.
The public sector has no cause for smugness. Vice chancellors, pro vice chancellors and key administrators have too often been chosen for political loyalty rather than scholarship, with appointments following party lines. In private universities the patron is the owner; in public ones, the party. The mechanism is identical: merit yields to loyalty, dissent is punished, and academic freedom shrinks.
Sociologists call this institutional convergence, the tendency of organisations in the same climate to adopt the same habits, bad ones included. We call it a scandal hiding in plain sight.
The Role of Ministry of Education
The law should separate ownership from academic management, cap family representation on boards, require open, merit-based search committees for senior posts and protect fixed terms from arbitrary dismissal. The same rules must bind public universities. A reform that disciplines only the private sector would be both unfair and useless, and the Ministry should have the courage to say so.
Audited accounts, fee structures, faculty pay scales and the share of income spent on teaching, research and scholarships should be published as a matter of routine. Surpluses should be reinvested under enforceable rules, consistent with the nonprofit principle the law already proclaims. Advertising should be policed too. A paid rating must never be sold to the public as an independent ranking.
An accreditation body should assess programmes against published standards: faculty qualifications, student outcomes, research activity and support for students. Regulators are easily captured by those they regulate. That is precisely why the body’s appointments, budget and decisions must be open to public view and protected by statute.
Competitive grants, decided by peer review and open to public and private institutions alike, would do more for national scholarships than a thousand ranking celebrations. Support for doctoral training and shared laboratories would lower the cost barrier that pushes private universities toward teaching alone.
Skills, Industry and the Free Mind
Industry coherence matters. Every education specialist prescribes that universities should work with employers on curricula. They should work on structure and internships, and track graduates for years afterwards. But a university that trains only for today’s job market prepares its students for obsolescence, because technologies change faster than syllabuses.
What most specialists often forget to add in their prescription is building graduate attributes. A university must also form the person. Philosophy, ethics, history, logic and civic reasoning, taught through argument rather than memorisation, build the habit of questioning authority, weighing evidence and refusing manipulation. Every graduate should carry a distinctive set of attributes that sets her or him apart. This is no ideological project but the ordinary equipment of a free mind, and a nation that has watched its institutions captured by loyalty and fear has more reason than most to value it. A graduate who can write code but cannot think independently is only half educated, and half-educated citizens are easy to lead but hard to trust.
If private universities answer to evidence, students and scholarship, they can raise national standards and relieve a strained public system. If they keep answering to owners and advertisers, they will grow richer while the country grows no wiser.
The same test applies to public universities and to the Ministry that oversees them all. No ranking table will settle the matter. Only open governance protects academic freedom, real research investment and plain speaking to the public can turn expansion into progress. We intend to keep asking until we see it.
