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« on: September 05, 2010, 04:08:32 PM »
Higher Education: Prior to1996, environmental education in the tertiary sector was rather disjointed and poorly developed. In 1996 Khulna University first offered a 4-year undergraduate degree in Environmental Science. It was the first public university to offer environmental education in Bangladesh.
Sylhet University (another public university) has offered a 4-year undergraduate degree Civil and Environmental Engineering since 1995. Some non-government universities have opened environmental education programs, such as Environmental Studies at North-South University (1995), and Environmental Science and Management at the Independent University (1996) and Environmental Science and Disaster management at Daffodil International University. Recently Dhaka University and Jahangir Nagar University (both public universities) opened undergraduate courses.
In the environment courses described here, student enrollment is very competitive and places available are limited (only 25-40 students in each course). Prospective students need to pay expensive enrollment fees in the non-government universities, so only richer guardians can afford this education. However, facilities for research and fieldwork are inadequate in all of these universities. In addition to these specialized courses all public universities in Bangladesh offer Ecology units in their B.Sc. and honors degrees with Botany or Zoology majors. At post-graduate level, there is a compulsory paper on Ecology in post-graduate Botany and Zoology programs. M.Sc courses in Environmental Management and Earth Science have been offered in Departments of Geography or Geology in some universities. Relatively better environment related units are offered in M.Sc. programs (some times undergraduate level also) in Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU), Khulna University’s School of Life Sciences and the Civil Engineering Department of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Environmental Engineering courses at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels are offered at BUET. The Bangladesh Institutes of Technology (BITs) also offer environmental engineering units within their undergraduate civil engineering courses. Polytechnic Institutes offer sanitary engineering units in the final year of three year civil engineering diploma courses. In addition, various institutes like the Public Health Training Institute, National Institute of Preventive and Social Medicine, Social Welfare Institute and Health Education Bureau also offer short-term sanitary engineering units for practitioner engineers, doctors, sanitary officers and social workers.
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