An accreditation council for universities
Friday, 11 September 2009
NEWSPAPER readers in Bangladesh cannot avoid coming across advertisements of a new university being set up in Dhaka or in other big cities. But higher education is not only about quantity and more important is quality. And more and more privately-run universities are found to be seriously deficient in quality. The inadequacies of the private universities are too well known. There is no need to repeat them here.
An accreditation council, for rating the private universities, needs to be set up as early as possible. It would accomplish several things. First of all, the students and their guardians will know about the standard of the private universities as each of them would be graded in order of performance.
The ranking will help them to decide whether or not to take admissions in a particular university. The ranking will also help the employers judge the relative worth of the certificates of private universities. The accreditation council will itself be a pressure on the managements to improve the standard of education for the private universities keen to remain in business. The council, on its part, should identify the deficient universities and tell their managements to improve within time-frame or lose their accreditation.
Fahima Siddiqui
Uttara, Dhaka
An accreditation council, for rating the private universities, needs to be set up as early as possible. It would accomplish several things. First of all, the students and their guardians will know about the standard of the private universities as each of them would be graded in order of performance.
The ranking will help them to decide whether or not to take admissions in a particular university. The ranking will also help the employers judge the relative worth of the certificates of private universities. The accreditation council will itself be a pressure on the managements to improve the standard of education for the private universities keen to remain in business. The council, on its part, should identify the deficient universities and tell their managements to improve within time-frame or lose their accreditation.
Fahima Siddiqui
Uttara, Dhaka