Higher education and sixth five-year plan

Dr. Hafiz G. A. Siddiqi

Photo: Yamin Tauseef Jahangir

THE draft Sixth Five Year Plan is said to be at the final stage. I was fortunate enough to be invited by the Planning Commission to comment on higher education chapter. I want to reemphasize one or two points I mentioned at that time.

The availability of a required number of highly educated and killed human resources are pre-requisites for economic, social and human development. To produce well qualified human resources it is necessary to establish a specific number of institutions of higher learning /research institutes / universities to impart high quality general, scientific and technical education matching the developmental needs of the country. This needs to be recognized in the national Five Year Plan. In Bangladesh education sector has rightly been given the highest priority. But if one decomposes the individual sub-sectors, namely, literacy program, universal primary education, secondary education, higher secondary education and tertiary education, the allocations against them individually do not match the desired priorities: higher education did not get the desired priority. If the planners are not careful, this may eventually be true even in case of the Sixth Five Year Plan. To balance prioritization, it is necessary to assign higher education priority higher than it received in the past. Literacy and universal primary education rightly received highest priority. Nobody would argue against this. But unfortunately this has been done at the cost of higher education including science and technology education. So far, during each plan period, most of the funds allocated for the entire education sector were spent on universal literacy programs; primary and secondary education and only an insignificant amount were spent on higher education. This was allegedly done on the advice of the donor agencies. This wrong policy has slowed down the growth and development of Bangladesh. If we review the factors that contributed to the rapid growth of successful developing countries, we find that all of them assigned very high priority to universal primary education and at the same time equally high priority to science and technology education and training. I suggest that the government consider revisiting the priorities. Higher education must get as much priority as universal primary education, if not higher. If we continue to emphasize only primary and secondary education, the nation will be saddled at a lower level of development. For sustainable rapid development, call it, economic development, social development, human development or Digital Bangladesh, the nation will need an increasing number of highly educated highly skilled manpower and professional leaders. The job of highly skilled professional leaders cannot be done by the high school graduates or by those who have just completed 12 years of schooling. They must spend several more years in acquiring higher level knowledge of some specific branch required for national development. Bangladesh must expand its capacity substantially to impart high quality higher education, particularly science and technology oriented education, and create facilities to do basic research at universities and Research Institutes. For this, Bangladesh must establish a large number of institutions of higher learning with high quality teaching and research facilities ( both general and technology oriented universities giving more emphasis on the latter) to produce well qualified scientists for undertaking basic research; such well educated and trained researchers will be necessary to implement many essential development programs, for example, much needed Food Security Program which calls for application of biotechnology to invent new techniques of growing HYVs of rice and other food crops. Similarly, to transform Bangladesh into Digital Bangladesha large number of scientists, engineers and ICT experts will be required to invent / discover new technology of connectivity; and to install and maintain the network of digitized Bangladesh. Beside, these ICT experts are expected to reduce dependency of Bangladesh on foreign sources for supply of technology by ensuring effective technology transfer. On similar vein, an increasing number of doctors with various specializations will have to be working in hospitals / clinics to ensure healthy manpower. If the students are not in good health, the education system cannot educate them properly and produce productive manpower. To ensure public health services for the nation, and diagnose and treat life-threatening diseases the country needs more and more physicians. To produce physicians more medical colleges and universities will be needed. In addition, engineers of almost all branches must be in place to design, install and run all the industries, to construct road network with bridges, to generate, transmit and distribute electricity, etc. in the country. To produce all these human resources is a function of higher education. To ensure the supply of all these skilled human resources Bangladesh must establish adequate number of universitiesgeneral, engineering, technical, medical, agricultural, research and other specialized universities.

It is to be noted that there is general dissatisfaction about the quality of education at almost all levels-primary, secondary, higher secondary and tertiary. The universities face difficulties in imparting quality education for many reasons, one important one being the poor quality of education imparted at lower levels primarily because the schools do not have adequate number of qualified teachers and teaching-learning environment. The candidates who seek admission at universities are mostly not prepared to study at an institution of higher learning, i.e. university, because the education they had received is of low quality because they were not taught by qualified and dedicated teachers. There is a dearth of qualified teachers at lower levels. This means that a larger number of well-trained teachers are necessary to run primary, secondary and higher secondary schools efficiently. It is to be noted that these teachers are produced by the institutions of higher education / universities; and for quality assurance at tertiary level, quality at primary and secondary levels must be improved. This implies that quality assurance at primary, secondary, higher secondary and tertiary levels depends on how quality is maintained at each level.

Priority of higher education and matching allocation
The priority assigned to a sector is indicated by the allocation made for that sector. The general public will look at the amount allocated to higher education in the Sixth Five Year Plan to see if the govt. has reconsidered its priority to higher education. Without specifying any figure, my suggestion is that the Sixth Five Year Plan should allocate to higher education an amount that will be at least equal to it will allocate for primary plus secondary education. By no means here I suggest that the allocation for primary and secondary education be reduced, and some fund from there transferred to higher education. They should continue to get the same priority as they have been getting. It is however assumed that the implementation of the project (establishment of universities along with research facilities and quality assurance) is properly and timely done. Otherwise the dream of Digital Bangladesh will remain unrealized; even the quality of the education sector as a whole will continue to remain low that will in turn slow down every kind of development.

Manpower plan
The education sector will not achieve its goals if it cannot produce the high quality graduates and researchers the society needs for its economic, social, technical, physical and overall human development. To make the education sector most productive a long term national manpower plan must be prepared matching the road map of national development. On the basis of this manpower plan, a long term educational plan needs to be prepared. These two plans must be complementary to each other. National manpower plan is a pre-requisite for a good plan for higher education and research. This manpower plan will define the road map of national educational plan that will indicate the number of universities and research institutes that will be established within a well defined time frame to produce the required number and types of skilled manpower to meet the development goals of the country. Educational plan and manpower plan must be in conformity with each other. The Sixth Five Year Plan must recognize the need for preparing the national plan for higher education that will match the national manpower plan.

The writer is Vice Chancellor, North South University.