Ranking the universities

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Going through the pages of a newspaper these days in Bangladesh, a reader is likely to frequently come across advertisements of a new university being set up somewhere in Dhaka or in the other big cities. But higher education is not only about quantity. More important or crucial is its quality. And it is in respect of this quality factor that the privately-run centres of higher education are found to be seriously deficient in standards in the greater number of cases. The inadequacies of the private universities are well known. There is no need to repeat them here. Only searching what may be done in response is a more useful exercise.
The major requirement seems to be the formation, as swiftly as possible, of an accreditation council for rating privately offered higher education and the findings of the work of such a council should be made public. Such a step will accomplish several things. First of all, the students and their guardians will know about the standard of the private universities as each of them is graded in order of performance like A, B, C, D and so on.
The ranking will help them to decide whether to take admission in such universities or not. The rankings will be a guide to employers about the relative worth of the certificates provided by the private universities. More significantly, the establishment of the accreditation council and its move to rank the universities according to performance will put the pressure on their management to go all-out to improve standard so as to get a good ranking and thereby enable them to remain in business. Besides, such a council, after it is set up, should aim to identify the substandard universities and tell their management to meet standards within a specified time frame or lose their licenses to operate.
Fahima Siddiqui
Uttara
Dhaka