Equity and standards in tertiary education

By Salimullah Khan. TERTIARY education has faced a crisis all over the world since the 1960s. As one war ended another began. Education provided the royal road to social mobility for many in the former colonial world, especially among the middle classes. Demand for tertiary education intensified as social expectations steeply rose. By that time, economic growth began to stagnate. This widening gap between the number of job-seeking educated young people and the effective demand for their skills caused a crisis in education on a world scale.
After liberation, Bangladesh had only a handful of public universities. Since the turn of the century, both public and private universities have proliferated. Growth, i.e. access is in itself a good thing. Equity, or filtering down, is however quite another. Growth in itself will not take care of equity. Education does not filter down. If it did, in 1947, after a hundred years of filtering down, literacy rate in the country would not remain stuck at 6% of the population.
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