Higher education strapped for cash

The biggest casualty is the quality of education. With 88 percent of the total budgetary allocation going to salaries of teachers, employees and infrastructure maintenance, only 12 percent is left for books journals, educational equipment and research, which indeed is a small amount, given the growing need for upgrading the educational facilities.

The question of what the universities are charging for education arises for obvious reasons at this point. While private universities have tuition fees averaging between Tk 5,000 and Tk 10,000 per month, the public universities charge a very nominal amount.

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Subsidies for higher education are given in most countries of the world, including the advanced ones, let alone the developing countries. These subsidies are part of the overall plan to give access to students, coming from the less privileged sections of society, to higher education. But the subsidies, we believe, must be rationalized in order to avoid the public universities depending too much on government support.

The quality of education is an issue that cannot be compromised on any pretext whatsoever. If the standard of education goes down, the whole purpose of having so many public universities will be defeated. True, the public universities have to pay the teachers and employees and spend a huge amount of money in infrastructure maintenance, but they cannot render the service that students need if there is scarcity of books, journals and all other educational facilities.

We, of course, do not support the idea of arbitrarily refixing the tuition fees and putting the burden of meeting their education expenses solely on the students. The university authorities should undergo a consultative process that will include the representatives of teachers, student bodies and parents before they opt for a reasonable raise in tuition fees. In principle, we are supportive of subsidy, but how much it is to be given has to be realistically determined so that it is compatible with affordability and the value for the services given.