Sheikh Selim
As editor-in-chief of this bulletin, I have grown weary of a particular sentence that surfaces in nearly every profile we run of a public figure in this country: graduate of a leading university, later trained by the relevant academy, widely regarded as one of the brightest of his or her generation. It is a formula so familiar that it has become almost invisible, a piece of ceremonial language we reach for out of habit rather than conviction. We print such sentences ourselves, routinely, and rarely stop to interrogate what credentials of this kind certify, whether competence, connections, or simply the ability to pass through a particular institutional gate.
This editorial is an attempt to pause on that formula and examine it more closely, to ask what work it is really doing when it appears in our own pages, and what it conceals about how merit and access actually function in institutions we treat as neutral arbiters of talent.
Attainment That Signals Everything and Nothing
Educational attainment in Bangladesh is typically reduced to a single, neat data point: a degree conferred, a CGPA earned, an institution named. Yet this seemingly straightforward marker conveys mixed signals rather than a coherent one. A first-class result from one department might reflect genuine command of the subject, while the identical result from another department might reflect nothing more than rote memorization paired with a lenient marking scheme. Two graduates holding the exact same paper credential can differ vastly in analytical capacity, ethical judgment, and civic awareness, and yet the transcript renders them indistinguishable.
Employers, government ministries, and even universities themselves have never developed the tools needed to tell these cases apart, so they fall back on a simpler proxy, one that can be read briefly: the brand name printed on the certificate. That proxy, the institution’s brand, has effectively become the real currency of educational attainment in the country. A degree from Dhaka University, BUET, or a handful of prestigious private universities unlocks opportunity regardless of what was genuinely learned in the classroom, while an equally demanding degree from a lesser-known public college gets discounted almost reflexively.
None of this is meant to suggest that branded institutions turn out inferior graduates; many produce excellent ones. The deeper issue is structural. Attainment within this system is judged less by demonstrated competence and the institution’s actual integration with the cutting-edge marketable skillset, and more by the prestige of the gate one happened to pass through to obtain the paper. When a society allows brand to substitute for substance this persistently, it should hardly be surprised when substance itself eventually starts to disappear.
Success Defined by Universities, for universities
If educational attainment is imprecise, institutional success is defined even more loosely. Ask a vice chancellor about success and the answer usually invokes enrolment growth, new departments, ranking mentions, or degrees conferred, administrative accomplishments that say nothing about what students gained (let alone the likely impact they will make to the nation or to the world). Universities rarely publish data tracking graduate employability, alumni civic participation, or how many graduates went on to strengthen rather than undermine public institutions. Success is defined largely on terms universities control and can present favorably, not on terms a student, parent, or taxpayer might reasonably prioritize.
Educational excellence suffers an identical fate. Pose the question of what makes a Bangladeshi university excellent, and the answer invariably circles back to seat competition ratios, entrance test difficulty, and faculty credentials measured by the count of foreign degrees held. Almost never does the answer touch on the character formed in a student, a willingness to serve the public good, or the capacity to resist corruption once placed in a position of trust.
Excellence, in this framing, has been quietly redefined as exclusivity of entry rather than integrity of output. A university difficult to gain admission to is presumed excellent by default, while a university whose graduates conduct themselves with unusual honesty after leaving rarely earns the same recognition, largely because no one has bothered to measure that outcome in the first place.
What the Record Actually Shows
This vagueness would remain a purely academic complaint if its consequences stayed confined within campus walls. They do not. Bangladesh’s banking sector has absorbed loan scandals running into billions of taka, engineered in no small part by officers and directors who hold precisely the branded degrees under discussion here. Procurement fraud, land grabbing, and customs evasion cases regularly feature defendants whose biographies read like a checklist of national academic achievement.
Were a brand name degree reliably capable of instilling patriotism and a sense of duty toward the public, this pattern would register as a statistical anomaly worth investigating. Instead, it resembles something closer to a pipeline: graduates who excelled at examinations have, with troubling regularity, failed to translate that same discipline into any ethical commitment toward the country that educated them.
Nowhere does this pattern surface more starkly than in the civil service. Officers entering through the Bangladesh Civil Service examination are drawn overwhelmingly from the same short list of branded universities, then receive further training at the Public Administration Training Centre and allied academies before being handed real authority over ordinary citizens’ lives. On paper, this constitutes a formidable filter: competitive entry layered atop structured professional training, a design that should, in theory, select for both capability and integrity.
In practice, the governance record produced by this pipeline tells a different story, one marked by chronic delays in public services, well documented bribery at the exact points where citizens interact with the state, and a bureaucratic culture that too often shields its own rather than serving the public it exists for. If elite education combined with formal public service training were genuinely sufficient to produce a corruption free administration, Bangladesh would already possess one. That it does not suggests the training being delivered, however rigorous it appears on paper, is simply not the training that matters most.
A Harder Truth About Political Leadership
The same pattern extends, more gravely still, into political leadership itself. In November 2025, Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal found former prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her former home minister guilty of crimes against humanity over the violent suppression of the student led uprising of 2024, sentencing both to death in absentia, a verdict Hasina has since dismissed from exile as politically motivated.
Whatever position one takes on the trial’s fairness, a question international observer have themselves flagged as warranting scrutiny, the underlying episode it addresses is damning on its own terms: the killing of protesting students and citizens by the machinery of a state helmed by graduates of the country’s most respected institutions. It stands as perhaps the starkest failure imaginable of educated leadership to serve as any kind of model for the youth it governed.
What makes this failure so corrosive is the credentialing itself. These were not uneducated actors stumbling into power; they were products of the same elite pipeline, branded universities, competitive exams, formal training, that society treats as guarantor of competence and character. The 2024 uprising is best read as an indictment of that assumption: students took to the streets because the political class above them, however credentialed, had failed to build a society they could trust or honestly lead.
That is not a partisan observation. It is simply what occurred, and it occurred at the hands of people whose formal educational attainment was never in doubt, which is exactly the point. If elite credentials were a reliable proxy for ethical governance, this outcome should have been close to impossible. That it was not only confirms how thoroughly Bangladesh has allowed the appearance of merit to substitute for its substance, right up to the highest levels of the state.
The Moral Hazard of the Brand
This is, plainly, a moral hazard. A degree from a top Bangladeshi university functions as social insurance, conferring a presumption of competence and integrity that is almost never revoked, no matter what the holder later does with the power it unlocks. Alumni networks compound rather than correct this, closing ranks around graduates under scrutiny and handing out ambassadorship roles, honorary titles, and platform space based on career rank alone, with no accounting for how that rank was exercised. A minister, central bank official, or corporate chief is celebrated by his alma mater regardless of whatever verdict history now attaches to his name. This is not ambassadorship. It is branding, extended unconditionally, insulated from the outcomes it claims to represent.
If our universities want the word excellence to mean anything again, they will need to attach real consequences to it. Alumni ambassadorship should be made conditional on conduct and revocable when conduct fails. Civic and ethical education should be built into every professional degree with the same seriousness currently reserved for technical syllabus content. Attainment itself should be reported alongside outcome data tracking what graduates do with the power their credentials grant them, not merely the marks they once achieved to obtain that credential in the first place.
Until universities are willing to make that shift, a Bangladeshi degree will remain exactly what this editorial has argued it already is: a vague signal, dressed in a respected name, telling us far less than we have long pretended it does. The uncomfortable truth is that a credential without accountability is not really a credential at all. It is a costume, and it is long past time our institutions stopped mistaking the costume for the person wearing it.
