Fees, students and private universities
SOMETHING must be going wrong with our private universities. If you have had cause to follow events, you just might recall the various incidents in which students of one private university have engaged in skirmishes with those of another. The reasons have been pretty petty and certainly peculiar. A young woman, pursuing studies at one university, is harassed by a bunch of young men putatively coming by education at another. The brother of the young woman protests such behaviour, justifiably. Soon after that, you run into these unsettling images of running street battles between large bodies of young men emerging furiously from the confines of their classrooms. It is not until those truncheon-wielding policemen swoop on them that matters somewhat get under control.
Now, you will agree it is all pretty disturbing. You do not expect students, and particularly at private universities, to go creating lawlessness on the streets. When the whole concept of private universities came into public focus in the early 1990s, it was given out (and we accepted that explanation) that the goal was a promotion of quality education that would not be interrupted by extraneous factors. The kind of political ferment that characterised the public universities would be absent. Besides, with the public universities unable to cope with the admission demands of the thousands of young men and women finishing higher secondary education, private universities would be the places where these young could go for higher academic attainments.
In other words, private universities would reinvent the young, through turning them into citizens of the world. Of course, since private universities were, well, private, it was understood that they would be expensive. The fees they would charge would be high, naturally. Which would make these universities quite elitist in nature. That too would be understandable.
But what does not look quite comprehensible or even acceptable is the thought that private universities should be arrogating to themselves the right to go for an increase in tuition fees in arbitrary manner. Take a look at any private university. There have been the frequent occasions when students as well as their guardians at these universities have been subjected to much psychological pressure through an enhancement of fees. Must that happen all the time? If you were to ask any young person studying at any one of these institutions, you would know of the predicament he or she was up against before a system which operates in its own inscrutable ways.
A healthy aspect of education at the public universities is that they abjure the arbitrary; they scrupulously stay away from putting students and their parents into a state of discomfort. And so you have a clear view of what the public interest is. Stretch the term a little and you will likely arrive at the very credible thought that capitalism, in a country defined by gruesome poverty, does not much care about citizens' welfare. Where the goal is the acquisition of wealth (and you do that these days through promoting basically education that promises instant, high-income jobs), you ought not to expect much from an education system which promotes such philosophies.
Now, what these young people at a private university were doing on Sunday (you condemn the hooliganism they resorted to once the police went after them) was fundamentally to inform the university administration that the recent hike in fees was a situation they could not cope with. A guardian put it in perspective: if a student who coughs up as much as forty five thousand taka for every semester now has to tell his parents that the university demands ten thousand taka more from him, what options are his guardians left with? Indeed, what happens to those who, unable to come up with the additional money demanded by the university authorities, find they cannot carry on with their studies?
It is here that you begin to wonder if a set of principles cannot be put in place about the working of private universities. The University Grants Commission has over the past couple of years gone after a number of private universities on such issues as the quality of teaching staff and proper campus-related facilities. Some universities which clearly failed to meet the required standards were simply shut down. That is all very fine. But isn't it time for the UGC, for the ministry of education, to make a move where capping a ceiling on academic expenses at the private universities is concerned?
Even private enterprise must have its limits, must be reined in once it appears to be losing sight of its essential goals. When private universities are observed to be leapfrogging across their stated objective of promoting quality education and aiming for financial gains not justified by circumstances, it is time for the state to come in.
And after the global recession, when capitalist governments have moved in with socialistic measures to salvage industry, you cannot quite say that private education in Bangladesh will remain a holy cow. Think about that.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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