Data-Driven Policy for Private Higher Education: Why Bangladesh Must Have a Separate Higher Education Commission for Private Universities
Empowering Bangladesh’s Private Universities Through Data-Driven Policy: A Vision for a Dedicated Higher Education Commission to Foster Innovation, Accountability, and Growth.
“Without data, we are just guessing. With the right data, we can lead.”
Bangladesh’s private tertiary sector is now a pillar of the nation’s tertiary system, enrolling more than half of all tertiary students. The governance of this sector remains rigidly centralized in the University Grants Commission (UGC), an institution still oriented to compliance checklists rather than outcomes. The absence of good-quality, real-time information on graduate employability, research output, student satisfaction, and teacher development has rendered universities rudderless, students uncertain, and policymakers without credible evidence.
This article recommends the imposition of a statutory requirement to establish a Private Higher Education Commission (P-HEC) to formulate and implement evidence-based policies tailored for private universities. This draws on the evidence from Bangladeshis’ own testimonials of administrators and teachers, and on learning from global and regional experiences—particularly in South Korea, Singapore, India, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka—and demonstrating how open data can be used to promote trust, underpin incentives, and support accountability. The report concludes with a four-pillar reform agenda: legislation, infrastructure, capacity building, and transparency.
The Missing Compass
True success in higher education systems is not guesswork. It feeds on vision, strategy, and evidence. Governments and regulators in leading economies have long realized that universities flourish when regulation is fact-based, not assumption.
In Bangladesh, the private universities are operating without a reliable compass. The University Grants Commission (UGC), which was established initially to regulate a few public institutions, still attempts to apply blanket policies to a sector that has grown to an astronomic size and complexity.
The policies are initiated without consultation and are not often backed with hard facts. As bluntly explained by one vice-chancellor:
“Policy by assumption rather than policy by evidence has become the norm.”
The consequences are severe:
Program approvals take years, so universities cannot respond to growing sectors such as fintech, data science, or renewable energy.
Research proposals get caught up in inscrutable review, so faculty avoid competitive research.
Faculty development programs are stifled, as conference attendance or international collaboration approvals are so long in coming that the opportunities have expired.
One dean of academic affairs verbalized the frustration this way:
“Every time we approach UGC for an approval of a new program, it is like throwing a stone into a dark well. We are listening for a sound that never occurs.”
Bangladesh needs a governance model where universities are judged not by the number of library seats or the conformity of their syllabi to Dhaka University’s, but by whether students succeed, research matters, and institutions improve. For that, a Private Higher Education Commission (P-HEC)—armed with real-time data—is essential.
The Price of Policy by Assumption
The appeals of administrators and faculty across the private sector are one: the system is measuring the wrong things. UGC remains focused on input, and better measures of success—are ignored.
Employment outcomes are ignored.
A faculty member from the business studies department said, “No UGC person ever asks us how many of our graduates find employment in six months. They want classrooms, chairs, and books. But employability is the actual metric.”
There is no respect for research output.
“We publish in good journals, but when we present these to UGC, they are incapable of distinguishing between Scopus and fake journals. Their evaluation model is three decades old.”
The student satisfaction rate is not observed.
A registrar spoke of: “We ask our students each semester, but UGC doesn’t care to examine the responses. Quality to UGC is whether the syllabus resembles Dhaka University’s. The student voice never exists.”
A professor and program director at NSU expressed her deep frustration:
“When we approach UGC for research funding, we are often told it is reserved only for public universities. On occasions when international scholarship or research grant opportunities are advertised, by the time we inquire, UGC either says the deadline has passed or simply dismisses us, claiming such opportunities are not open to private universities. This pattern of neglect is not accidentally reflects a deliberate bias that consistently favors public universities while sidelining private institutions. The result is systemic discrimination, where the contributions and aspirations of private universities are rendered invisible. Our voice, as private institutions, simply does not exist in their framework.”
Table 1. Data Blind Spots in Current UGC Oversight
Domain What Matters Globally What UGC Monitors Resulting Gap
Employment Outcomes Graduate employability, salaries, career progression Classrooms, library seats Employability ignored
Research Output Indexed publications, citation impact Faculty headcount, budget line items Research quality invisible
Student Satisfaction Teaching/advising surveys, campus experience Syllabus conformity to DU/BUET Student voice excluded
Faculty Development PhD completion, training, collaborations Faculty headcount, designation Growth opportunities missed
These examples illustrate a key lesson: data empowers choice, drives accountability, and fuels improvement.
The result is demoralization. Students are unsure whether degrees are marketable. Faculty feel that their work is not seen. Administrators lose credibility with parents. The system creates little excellence, only compliance.
Why Data Matters
In higher education, data is not an entitlement—it is the compass that indicates the direction. Universities and regulators around the globe have come to accept that assumption or anecdote-led decision-making is no longer enough in the 21st century. Data has become the oxygen of higher education governance, shaping funding models, informing student choice, and determining institutional reputation.
Without data, policymaking is guesswork. Universities stray off course, students are misguided, and professors go unremunerated for their work. Yet when data are gathered systematically, examined, and shared, it converts governance into a virtuous circle of trust, duty, and continuous improvement.
Singapore: Data for Families and Policy Makers
Singapore provides one of the superior demonstrations of how information can empower and enlighten families and institutions. Annually, the Ministry of Education (MOE) publishes a Graduate Employment Survey that indicates graduates’ rate of employment and median pay by university and field. This survey is widely used by:
Parents and students determine which programs to take.
Universities in comparing their performance against national peers.
Employers who recognize institutions with a history of producing employable graduates.
The impact is significant. For example, statistics from the survey have shown that information technology and business analytics graduates find jobs sooner and get higher pay than those in some traditional disciplines. As a result, universities have redesigned curricula to be more employable, and policymakers have launched programs to retrain graduates in underperforming areas.
South Korea: Linking Money to Measurable Outcomes
South Korea is more austere: it ties government subsidies to measurable performance. The government tracks research productivity, quality of faculty, and employability of graduates through its National Research Foundation (NRF) and other agencies. Institutions that perform well receive enhanced subsidies and support from the state; poorly performing ones receive cuts.
This system, which is difficult to achieve, has assisted South Korea in accelerating its development as a knowledge economy. Universities are rewarded not only to increase enrollment but to ensure that graduates thrive in the labor market. It encourages professors to publish in top-tier journals and engage in international collaborations, as these actions promote institutional reputation and secure funding. The logic is simple: public money should be targeted where evidence shows it has the most significant impact.
The United Kingdom: Students’ Voices Count
In the UK, the National Student Survey (NSS) is an annual, national student survey asking final-year undergraduates to rate their institutions on teaching quality, academic support, learning resources, and satisfaction. Results are released openly and exert significant influence on university league tables, the media, and prospective students’ choices.
The effect has been transformative. Universities cannot afford to ignore the student voice, as poor scores will have a direct impact on their standing and admissions. Departments that consistently record low satisfaction scores have had to rethink teaching, introduce new advising processes, and create improved facilities. The NSS proves that student satisfaction is no “soft” measure, it is a highly effective driver of accountability and improvement.
Beyond the West: A Global Standard
These practices have been institutionally ingrained worldwide. Australia boasts its Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) framework, which publishes graduate employment, satisfaction, and outcome results in great detail. The European Union’s U-Multirank provides cross-country comparisons of research, teaching, and internationalization. Even in developing countries, tracer studies and research repositories are increasingly being embraced as standard instruments to confirm that universities comply with their obligations.
Bangladesh: The Missing Link
Bangladesh, however, has none of these institutions. The UGC does not conduct systematic graduate tracer surveys or track research productivity in internationally comparable forms. Student satisfaction is never tracked at a national level, and faculty development is invisible to the regulatory system. As a Bangladeshi pro-vice-chancellor put it with frustration:
“Without measure, there can be no control. UGC lacks a measurement culture beyond documentation.”
The consequences are grim:
Parents decide to attend a university on reputation or rumor rather than fact.
Policy makers base policy on anecdote, not fact.
Universities are judged by compliance with outdated templates rather than outcomes.
The Core Message
Data isn’t bureaucracy, it’s the foundation of trust, competition, and accountability. Without it, universities drift helplessly, policy is in the dark, and students lose out. With it, institutions can benchmark, innovate, and compete globally. The question is whether Bangladesh will continue to hold its private higher education sector in the dark or shift to the light of evidence-based leadership.
Comparative Lessons from Asia
4.1 South Korea: Policy-to-Performance
South Korea’s National Research Foundation (NRF) is equipped with real-time dashboards that monitor research productivity, faculty credentials, and graduate employability. The underperforming institutions risk losing funding, which obliges universities to align with national priorities.
4.2 Singapore: Transparency as Trust
Singapore’s Ministry of Education conducts an annual Graduate Employment Survey. Institution-by-institution and program-by-program findings are released to the public. “Without transparency, it’s just marketing slogans,” opined a Singaporean administrator.
4.3 India: Accreditation and Assessment
India’s National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) assesses universities on curriculum planning, teaching, research, and student services. While not flawless, NAAC has forced institutions to rely on measurable criteria and monitor progress.
4.4 Malaysia: MyMOHEs Dashboards
MyMOHE, an online portal providing up-to-date enrollment, employability, and research statistics, is maintained by Malaysia’s Ministry of Higher Education. Employers use it for informing recruitment decisions, and policymakers for informing incentives.
4.5 Sri Lanka: Graduate Tracer Studies
Sri Lanka publishes national tracer studies regularly, tracking where graduates work and how their disciplines perform in the job market. These statistics have given rise to policy actions explicitly targeted, for example, skill schemes for arts graduates.
Table 2. Regional Models of Data-Driven Higher Education Policy
Country Key Mechanism Focus Areas Relevance for Bangladesh
South Korea NRF Dashboards Research output, employability Funding linked to outcomes
Singapore MOE Graduate Employment Survey Employment, salaries, career outcomes Transparency builds trust
India NAAC Accreditation Curriculum, research, student services Benchmarks for quality
Malaysia MyMOHEs Dashboards Enrollment, employability, research Real-time public data
Sri Lanka Graduate Tracer Studies Discipline-specific employability Targeted policy design
These illustrations have a simple lesson to convey data promotes choice, encourages accountability, and speeds up improvement.
How a Private HEC Can Change Policy
Establishing a Private Higher Education Commission (P-HEC) would not be yet another bureaucratic reorganization; it would be a revolutionary shift in the way Bangladesh oversees its private universities. Private institutions were treated as offshoots of the public model for decades, governed by inflexible and outdated benchmarks rather than results relevant to students, employers, and society. A P-HEC can transform the culture of governance from paperwork to performance, from control to collaboration, and from assumption to evidence.
This change would be based on three interconnected pillars: establishing a centralized data infrastructure, crafting evidence-based policy, and building trust and accountability through openness.
5.1 Centralized Data Infrastructure
At the hub of an up-to-date regulatory system is a national higher education data dashboard. A P-HEC might create a system whereby all private universities submit normalized data on sets of agreed-upon indicators, verified and updated each year (or even each quarter). This would be a revolution compared with UGC’s current reporting, which is mainly descriptive and compliance checklist driven.
Why these matters
Presently, no Bangladeshi student can log on to a government website and view how the University X graduates perform in the job market compared to University Y. Parents must rely on reputation, marketing hype, or rumor.
It is not straightforward for employers to identify which schools reliably produce the most skilled graduates.
There is no option but to guess for policymakers, since there is no evident evidence of which institutions are creating value.
What it could look like:
Graduate Employment Outcomes: Figures collected through tracer surveys at 6 and 12 months after graduation. This would allow policymakers to notice, for example, whether engineering graduates from certain universities are reaching 90% employment in six months while others lag at 50%.
Research Productivity: Systematic collection of faculty publications, indexed in Scopus or Web of Science, with numbers of citations. Dashboards may track collaborative networks, showing the number of faculty participating in international research collaborations.
Student Satisfaction: Standardized questionnaires, administered annually, would feed into a national database. These questionnaires could focus on teaching quality, availability of academic advising, campus facilities, and extracurricular activities.
Staff Development: Universities and colleges would indicate how many of their staff hold PhDs, the number of hours of professional development offered annually, and the frequency with which they have visiting scholar programs.
Globally, such dashboards already exist. Malaysia’s MyMOHEs, for example, provides real-time enrollment and employability statistics. Singapore’s Graduate Employment Survey provides salary and employment rates by discipline. A P-HEC dashboard would allow Bangladesh to join the global trend, with decision-making informed by evidence.
5.2 Evidence-Based Policy Design
When evidence is available, policy can move beyond one-size-fits-all regulations to evidence-based incentives and interventions. Presently, UGC treats all private universities equally—whether they are world-class research universities or low-achieving institutions that pass the bare minimum. Such blanket treatment dampens ambition and discourages excellence.
With evidence-based policy:
The best-performing programs can be rewarded with quick approvals for new degrees, growth, or partnerships. For example, a perennially high-performing business school can quickly approve a new master’s degree without years of bureaucratic hassle.
Research universities with better research outputs can have access to highly competitive grants or international partnership programs as a top priority.
These low-performing institutions would not only be penalized but also be requested to submit corrective action plans, with improvement mechanisms to enhance. For example, if a university’s student satisfaction levels have been in the red zone for three consecutive years, it would be requested to reengineer curricula, improve advising, and submit progress reports.
This model is already implemented elsewhere. In South Korea, employability and research productivity are directly linked to funding formulas. In India, reputation is affected by NAAC scores, and eligibility for grants and recognition is affected as well. A P-HEC can adopt a hybrid approach—merging incentives for excellence with interventions upon underperformance.
5.3 Trust and Accountability
One of the strongest frailties of the current regulatory environment is a lack of public trust. Parents and students often report a lack of reliable information to determine which private university is superior to another. The result is over-reliance upon prestige, location, or anecdote—factors not necessarily aligned with academic quality or job prospects.
A P-HEC can reinstate trust by keeping information open.
For students and teachers: Public dashboards would provide valid, comparable information about employment rates, student satisfaction, and teaching qualifications. The choice to attend a university would be an educated one, not a gamble.
For employers: Companies can identify who produces consistently good graduates with the right skills. Industry-university connections would strengthen in the long run.
For universities: High-performing institutions would finally be recognized. Rather than being lumped together with their poorer-performing colleagues, high-performing universities would be able to showcase their merits with government-verified data.
Transparency has a disciplining effect as well. One Bangladeshi faculty leader put it this way:
“When data are open, excuses vanish. Everyone must confront the truth, and that truth spurs change.”
Table 3. Proposed Dashboard Indicators for a Private HEC
Category Indicators
Employment Outcomes % employed in 6 months, median salary, industry distribution
Research Productivity Publications per faculty, citation index, collaborations
Student Satisfaction Teaching quality, advising, infrastructure, campus life
Faculty Development % PhD faculty, training hours, visiting scholar exchanges
Equity & Access Scholarships, gender balance, first-generation student outcomes
Why This Transformation Matters
The combination of centralized data, evidence-based policy, and transparent accountability would be a revolution for Bangladesh’s private universities. Approvals for programs would no longer depend on whether the syllabus is a reverse replica of Dhaka University’s. Research by faculty would no longer go unrewarded. Parents would no longer choose institutions in secrecy.
Instead, the system would reward outcomes, expose weaknesses, and give all stakeholders confidence that the sector is being led towards greatness. In practical terms, a P-HEC would allow one to answer such queries as:
Which private universities produce the most hirable engineers?
Which courses yield the most foreign research collaborations?
Which schools do the best in educating first-generation college students?
These aren’t technical questions; they are the foundation of national competitiveness in a knowledge economy.
The Human Cost of the Status Quo
The absence of reliable, open, and systematically collected information in Bangladesh’s higher education is not only a technical deficiency; it has profound human consequences. It affects the career choices of students, demotivates staff, and erodes institutions’ reputations in the eyes of society. The cost is incurred every day in terms of missed opportunities, wasted talent, and wasted trust.
6.1 Students Graduate into Uncertainty
For students, university studies are supposed to be a passport to opportunity. But in Bangladesh, the majority of students graduate without a clear understanding of their prospects in the job market.
One career service director openly admitted:
“They ask us about jobs. We cannot answer truthfully because nobody collects the data.”
Without graduate employment studies or tracer studies, universities cannot inform students:
What percentage of alums got jobs within six months?
Typically, which industries are hiring the graduates of a specific course?
Typically, what the median starting salary is for particular courses.
Nations like Australia or Singapore regularly provide such information, enabling students to make informed decisions. An aspiring engineering student in Singapore, for example, not only gets to see the employment ratio but also the median monthly income of new graduates. Students in Bangladesh are left with uncertain futures and unsubstantiated promises.
This uncertainty has costs. Families spend life’s savings on private university education, sometimes mortgaging land or borrowing. When graduates lack clear paths to jobs, disillusionment is not merely personal—it is economic and intergenerational.
6.2 Faculty Are Feeling Disillusioned
Scholars are the anchors of academic achievement, yet when their work is ignored or devalued, morale collapses.
One mid-career researcher spoke of his disillusionment:
“I have ceased making applications for UGC research grants. The process is non-transparent, the criteria stale, outcomes adverse.”
Faculty encounter several barriers:
Research invisibility: International journal publications are not identified well by UGC, so sophisticated scholarships find no policy relevance.
Funding bottlenecks: Applications for research grants tend to vanish into administrative black holes.
Professional stagnation: Training or conference-going opportunities are postponed by the approval process after events have occurred.
In such systems where tracking of research is good, faculty careers thrive. For example, in South Korea, research output is mechanistically linked to promotion and funding. In Malaysia, research indicators directly feed into institutional rankings, pushing collaboration and innovation.
In Bangladesh, on the other hand, professors often get the sense they are composing scholarship in a void, unseen and unrewarded. The result is not only demotivation—it is flight of talent, because scholars seek opportunities elsewhere where they can be appreciated.
6.3 Administrators Lose Credibility
University administrators—vice-chancellors, registrars, deans—are tasked to convince families, employers, and the broader community that their institutions add value. But without official data, their credibility is irretrievably lost.
As one admissions director explained:
“Parents want to know: how do our graduates measure up to DU or BUET? We don’t have official numbers to provide.”
That leaves administrators in a corner, forced to resort to anecdotal testimony. They may show outstanding examples of individual graduates, but without government-validated overall evidence, such stories are weak at best.
The lack of legitimacy has a ripple effect:
They are unwilling to pay out for private universities for fear that they will not offer the same opportunities as state-funded ones.
Would-be employers remain skeptical, opting to take recruits from “established” institutions rather than look at evidence of graduate achievement.
The sector in general suffers credibility, with private universities unfairly stigmatized as “second tier” even when this is not the case.
In transparent dashboard countries—such as Malaysia’s MyMOHEs or Sri Lanka’s graduate tracer studies—officials can proudly show evidence of outcomes. In Bangladesh, officials go in empty-handed, keepers of paper but not evidence.
6.4 The Broader Social Consequences
The social costs of this vacuum of data go beyond individuals to the broader society:
Misalignment of the economy: Bangladesh needs skills in ICT, renewable energy, logistics, and health sciences. Policymakers are unaware whether universities are producing adequate numbers of these graduates—or too many in others—due to the lack of data.
Inequity and access gaps: Without tracking first-generation students or gender gaps, inequities go undetected and unaddressed.
Brain drain: Top-performing students and faculty depart the nation, not only for more money, but for locales where outcomes are measured and prized.
6.5 Summary: Data as Human Dignity
Essentially, a deficiency in data is a denial of responsibility and dignity. Students are entitled to know whether their degrees will lead to jobs. Staff are entitled to see that their efforts are valued and rewarded. Administrators are entitled to demonstrate the value of their institution. And society is entitled to be able to trust that the billions invested in higher education are producing real dividends.
As it was warned by one vice-chancellor:
We do not fear asking questions. We fear becoming obsolete. Without data, our universities can become ceremonial, which is to say, ineffectual.
The human cost is too high to continue with the status quo. A data-driven P-HEC is not just a question of enhancing governance effectiveness—it is a question of restoring hope, credibility, and respect for Bangladesh’s private higher education.
Towards a Roadmap for Reform
Reform must be founded on four pillars.
7.1 Legislation
Enact a law to establish the Private Higher Education Commission with a clear mandate over data collection, release, and evidence-informed policymaking. Appoint a Chief Data Officer to set standards and ensure methodological integrity. Safeguard academic freedom by regulating results, not ideas.
7.2 Infrastructure
Create a National Platform for Higher Education Data with secure institutional portals, validation systems, and real-time dashboards. Adopt international standards such as UNESCO ISCED to assure comparability. Pilot in a dozen universities before national rollout.
7.3 Capacity Building
Invest in IR units at institutions. Train registrars, deans, and career services officers to read dashboards and improve their performance. Host Data for Learning Summits where universities share innovations. Offer recognition awards to encourage adoption.
7.4 Transparency & Accountability
Enforce an annual State of Private Higher Education Report. Release standardized outcome cards for all universities in employment, research, and student satisfaction. Give incentives to high achievers with fast-track approvals and innovation grants. Implement demand correction action plans for chronic underachievers.
Conclusion: From Guessing to Leading
Bangladesh’s private universities are trapped in a regulatory culture that favors compliance over innovation and inputs over outcomes. The UGC’s paper-based regulation is incapable of delivering the kind of dynamic, innovative higher education that Bangladesh’s youth so urgently need.
A Private Higher Education Commission, with data-driven guidance, can replace assumptions with evidence, suspicion with trust, and bureaucracy with leadership.
As a vice-chancellor of one university put it, with frustration and hope:
“We don’t fear accountability. We fear becoming irrelevant. If you give us room and information, we will create universities that can compete on any global stage.”
Bangladesh has a choice today: guess in the dark as of old, or dauntingly enter the era of evidence-based leadership.
Source:
https://southasiajournal.net/data-driven-policy-for-private-higher-education-why-bangladesh-must-have-a-separate-higher-education-commission-for-private-universities/
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