Bangladesh is attempting something difficult. We are moving out of the least developed country status and trying to climb the value chain at the same time. That shift does not need more graduates. It needs different ones.

For forty years our economy rewarded people who could execute a defined task reliably. The next decade will reward people who can define the task in the first place. Someone who can look at an unstructured problem, work out what is actually being asked, pull in knowledge from outside their own discipline, and take responsibility for a decision made with incomplete information.

Are universities preparing students for that? Partly, and I would rather say so plainly than claim otherwise. Our curriculum revision cycles move in years where industry moves in months. That gap is structural and no university in this country equipped with that is running fast.

What we can control is everything around the skills and attitude of the students. A student who has competed against two hundred teams in a national case competition, or spent forty eight hours solving live cybersecurity problems, or stood in a steel plant watching the theory from their textbook operate at industrial scale, learns something a syllabus cannot deliver on its own. Therefore, the academic institutions have to put emphasis on bringing national changes in the skills and attitudes of the students. 

For most of their history, universities held something close to a monopoly on organised knowledge. People approach universities because the books, the laboratory and the expert were here and nowhere else.

That monopoly is about to finish. Any student with a smartphone now has access to more information, better organised and faster retrieved, than any library we could build. Pretending otherwise would be an act of institutional denial.

So the question becomes what is left. In my view, three things.

The first is judgment. An AI system will produce a fluent, confident and occasionally wrong answer. Knowing which is which requires a trained mind that has engaged with the underlying material. The second is the quality of the question. The person who asks a sharper question gets a better answer, and that skill is entirely human. The third is accountability. When a decision affects real people, someone must own it. A model cannot stand in front of a client, a court, or a community and take responsibility.

Presidency University Campus. Photo: Courtesy

Here, the new age call for a massive change is teaching-learning methods.

You cannot lecture someone into critical thinking. It is built through structured disagreement, repeatedly, in a setting where being wrong carries no humiliation.

That is why co-curricular and extra-curricular activities leading to developing soft skills gained  currently to the way tertiary education is being offered. In this regard, the system must permit the students to agree with the freedom even if it is not much desired by our social customs. Debate forces a student to argue a position they may not hold, which is the fastest way to understand that their own view has weak points. Case competitions place them in front of judges who will challenge their reasoning in real time. Research exposes them to the possibility that their hypothesis simply does not hold.

But there is a cultural precondition that is more important than any of these activities. Students will not question established ideas if questioning the teacher is treated as disrespect. Confidence is not built in a classroom where the safest strategy is agreement. Faculty have to model the behaviour first, by saying “I am not certain” in front of a class, by engaging with an objection rather than dismissing it. That is an institutional culture question before it is a pedagogy question.

Three things, and none of them are glamorous.

Time. A faculty member carrying a heavy teaching load has no research hours left. Research does not happen in the gaps between classes. It requires protected time, and protected time costs money.
Incentives. If promotion and renewal are assessed primarily on teaching hours delivered, a rational academic will optimise for teaching hours. Until research output genuinely affects career progression, exhortation will not work.

Infrastructure. That means funding pathways, ethics review, data access, and a credible venue for publication. This is partly why the Presidency University Journal matters to us. 
I would add a fourth point. Research in Bangladesh should start with Bangladeshi problems. Water, energy, climate adaptation, urban systems, financial inclusion. We do not need to replicate questions already being answered elsewhere. We need to answer the ones nobody else is asking because the problem is ours.

A great deal of university entrepreneurship activity is theatre. A pitch competition, a certificate, a photograph, and nothing afterwards. Hence, there are some thought provoking points that are to be taken into account by the policy circles of the academic.

First, Tolerance of failure, without academic penalty. A student whose venture fails has usually learned more than one who never attempted it, and our assessment systems rarely recognise this.

Second, there is also a social reality to confront. In Bangladeshi families, a salaried position carries status that a struggling venture does not. A university that is serious about entrepreneurship has to engage with the parents as much as the students.

Third, industry tells us graduates are not ready, but rarely tells us in actionable detail what ready would look like. The universities that close this gap fastest will be the ones that build genuine working relationships with employers, not ceremonial ones.

A four year degree today cannot be a forecast of the labour market in 2040. Any institution claiming to have that foresight is overselling. What a degree can do is equip someone to adapt when the forecast turns out to be wrong.

At the end, it is worth mentioning that education enlightens the human being so it must teach the students how to make a distinction between what to do and what not. You cannot cultivate that through a lecture on ethics. It comes from exposure to consequence. Community service where students meet the people they are serving. Research into problems that affect communities rather than abstractions. Clubs that organize blood donation drives and winter relief and have to deal with the logistics and disappointments. 

And it comes from how an institution behaves when nobody is watching. How we treat a student in difficulty. How we respond when we lose one of our own. Students absorb the values of the institution they spend four years inside, far more than they absorb the content of any single course. That is a responsibility we take seriously, and it is the part of this work that does not appear in any ranking table.