Bangladesh needs a new social contract for higher education

When it comes to higher education, Bangladesh does not have a funding problem; what it has, instead, is an accountability problem. Every year, billions in funding flow into public universities, research institutes, and national agencies. Campuses expand, degrees multiply, and policies are announced. Yet, one question remains unanswered: who is actually responsible for the results?

Are universities accountable for whether students learn and graduate? Are students accountable for making use of heavily subsidised education? Is the research system accountable for solving national problems? At present, the honest answer is: no one is accountable, fully.

The prime minister’s visit to Dhaka University in May, his first since taking office, reignited familiar debates about quality, global rankings, and research relevance in public universities. Then came the controversy over a minister’s remark comparing Dhaka University to a coaching centre. These moments underlined a frustration that many Bangladeshis share. What Bangladesh needs instead is a new social contract for higher education, one that makes responsibility visible and links public investment to real outcomes.

Today, a student at a public university receives an education almost entirely financed by the taxpayers. That fact remains largely invisible and unaccounted for. Funding flows through block grants to institutions. Students pay little, and rarely think about the scale of investment behind their degree.

A straightforward reform would change this. Every student admitted to a public university would receive a formal higher education scholarship. Nothing changes about who pays: the state continues to finance education in those institutions. But the mechanism becomes transparent. Funding would follow the student, and the universities would receive allocations based on enrolment and, crucially, on student progression. If students drop out or fail to advance, funding declines. If they succeed, institutions are supported.

Here, the benefit is twofold: students gain a concrete understanding of what public investment means—not as an abstraction—but as something with their name on it, and universities gain a direct incentive to prioritise teaching quality, academic support, and retention over expansion for its own sake. This is not privatisation but performance-linked public funding that keeps the state firmly in control.

The scholarship model targets one specific cost: teaching. Infrastructure, capital development, and strategic expansion would continue to flow through government grants, as they do today. Universities could also grow income through competitive research awards and development funds. The model does not cut university budgets; it only makes the teaching portion more transparent and directly accountable to student outcomes.

The research awards and development funds, however, depend on a system capable of generating them. Bangladesh’s research capacity is not as weak as its global rankings suggest. Institutions such as Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), Soil Resource Development Institute (SRDI), Geological Survey of Bangladesh (GSB), Bangladesh Space Research and Remote Sensing Organization (SPARRSO), and others generate genuine knowledge. The problem is that they operate in isolation: from universities, from each other, and from national priorities. Research funds are scattered across ministries with minimal coordination, creating duplication and missed opportunities.

The solution, then, should be structural. The government should establish a national research council, modelled broadly on UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), that directs research and innovation funding in the UK, but designed for Bangladesh’s scale and needs. Such a body would provide sustained core funding to permanent national research institutions, coordinate competitive grants across universities and disciplines, and align the whole system with long-term national challenges: water security, climate resilience, agriculture, health, energy, AI, etc.

This framework would also address something rarely discussed: the absence of a genuine research culture inside universities. That means investing in staff development, building pathways for junior academics, and integrating students into real research work as active contributors rather than afterthoughts. These are cultural interventions, not expensive ones, and a national coordination body is the right vehicle to drive them.

A system that funds institutions without measuring what they produce will always stagnate. Bangladesh should introduce a performance-based strategic funding layer, with reviews every five to seven years assessing teaching quality, student progression, research output, and contribution to national priorities.

Institutions that perform well would receive additional research and development support. Those that underperform would face structured pressure to improve. This is not punitive by design; it is the basic logic of any serious public investment framework. Over time, it would also shift university leadership from ceremonial authority to genuine accountability for outcomes.

Critics may argue that these proposals belong to wealthier countries, but the core challenge in Bangladesh is not a lack of spending, but rather a lack of alignment. Public money already flows through multiple channels into higher education, but those channels run in parallel, with no shared logic and limited accountability for what they produce.

The political economy of this reform deserves to be stated plainly. The government would retain the upper hand. Students would remain dependent on the state through the visible scholarship. Universities would continue to rely on the government for development finance and national research investment. What changes is not who holds power, but how transparently and productively that power operates.

A more integrated system would not necessarily cost more, but it would deliver far better returns: in learning quality, research relevance, and the institutional leadership the country needs.

A new social contract would make responsibilities explicit: the state funds transparently, universities perform accountably, students recognise the value of public investment, and research serves the nation with coherence and purpose. So, the question that the state must confront is whether to keep managing the system’s failures or finally redesign it.

Mo Hoque is senior lecturer in hydrogeology and environmental geoscience at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He can be reached at mo.hoque@port.ac.uk

Ashraf Dewan is director of research at the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Australia. He can be reached at a.dewan@curtin.edu.au.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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