Farook Ahmed :
Just step in a class room of any private university, images of blank eyes, pale faces, disheveled hair and bedraggled clothes will flash before your eyes giving you a feeling of pain and uneasiness. Students’ dismal faces will compulsively propel you to digress from your lecture and plunge you into a melancholic state. As a teacher of a private university this is our everyday experience.
Most students when they fail to get admitted in public universities, willy-nilly, they opt for private universities casting their families under back-breaking economic burden. Students and their parents hope that a university degree will bring in for them economic relief and social dignity. So parents pump huge money into the coffers of private universities for a certificate for their sons and daughters.
A random survey reveals that 75% parents are not well-to-do and 40% of them sell their meager arable land to meet their wards’ university expenses and in the process gradually become landless. Remaining 35% parents take loans from banks, relatives or from rich men relatively at high interest. Expenses incurred by a private university student put entire family into deep abyss.
Hope drives students and their impecunious parents to spend their hard-earned money to attain virtually useless private university degrees. In the job markets certificates of public universities are accorded preference over that of the certificates of private universities.
This visible preference and discrimination frustrates the hope and dream of the students of private universities.
Every year thousands of students are obtaining certificates in various disciplines from more than 78 private universities. These huge
educated work-forces will remain unemployed if effective steps are not taken by the government.
We suggest and recommend that Govt. may enact law or make provision for reservation of specified quota for private university degree holders in all public and private jobs.
Now most of the public and private posts are being filled in by the degree holders of public universities and other state-owned institutions.
If we can ensure some measure of certainty of jobs for private university students, we deem that their hope and dream will blossom into reality, their parents will have peace and relief and money spent will not be wasted. We will see sportive, animated and cheerful faces in the class rooms. The tuition fees of private universities are unreasonably exorbitant.
The fees and other charges need to be scaled down to ensure affordability for poor students.
We have unsubstantiated reports that in order to defray the excessive fees and other related charges, many needy students are indulging in criminal and immoral activities. Even few girl students are secretly being engaged in flesh business.
If true, this is alarming news for us which warrants immediate attention. Because of high intensity of despondency, rate of drug-abuse is the highest among the private university students.
Thousands of young marriageable girls will remain unmarried if the students of private universities do not get jobs. This will certainly precipitate social imbalance. The dreams of students of private universities are not sky-high. They just want decent jobs to lead Spartan lives.
(The writer is ex-DIG of Bangladesh police)
