The Argument for Expanding Free Public Education in Bangladesh

The government of Bangladesh recently announced that along with making secondary and tertiary education free for students in public institutions, it will put together a trust to provide scholarship stipends for high achieving students.

This move, directed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, ensures Bangladesh’s future as an innovating economy and stabilizes its export market for in-demand labor and human capital.  The policy move also ensures equality of opportunity for this young country of 150 million, its median age  a young and promising 23.

As things stand now, primary school education is now free in public institutions, while at the secondary and higher levels, a minority of students are funded through stipends.  This move would cover the tuition expenses of all students enrolled in public institutions, some 4 million students.  This government has promised that along with free education, a set of so considered meritorious students would receive a  monthly stipend in excess of tuition costs.

Government ministries will now set about to plan out the ways and means that are available to bring the proposed policy change. Without a doubt the funding mechanism will be some salutary combination of public and private funds and it will be a difficult push to achieve the goals laid out.  What is incontestable here is the fact that this move will come about.  And that is all to the good.  For far too long the creaking system has let far too many promising students slip through the cracks, falling into a common pool of individual disappointment and social dissolution.

USAID estimates that as large a share as 30% of Bangladeshi children do not have a primary school education.  Given that while considering enrolling their children in primary schools, parents must make an inter-temporal tradeoff for costly private secondary and tertiary education, a free higher education implies that the enrollment rate of children in public institutions, already high at 94%, is likely to increase.  Similarly, graduation rates can be expected to rise as well, while dropouts rates are likely to decrease.

Note however that this plan is more than likely unfeasible if the government does not increase its spending on education. 2005 UNDP figures suggest that the till then the government spend 2.4% of GNP on education, while both India and Nepal spent upwards of 3%.  Indeed, Pakistan, known for its broken and stringing education system spends 2.7% of GNP on its frail education system.

If the government manages to increase its share of the national product on education, almost every index of education outcomes will increase.  And its more than likely that matching donor funds will increase, as bilateral and multilateral donors and donor agencies observe tightening results and diminishing corruption.  (I assume, as must any other analyst, that better results in the educational system are highly correlated with diminishing corruption.)

Perhaps the greatest impact of free secondary and tertiary education is that it will increase equality of opportunity in a country were through self-selection most non-enrolled students belong to a socio-economically disenfranchised and disadvantaged group of households.  The vast majority of those households have wage earners who are broadly illiterate.  Though education outcomes, and in time wage inequality in Bangladesh, is likely to widen–due to individuals seeking employment in sectors that yield different wages–everyone in the public system will, finally, start from the same, level, playing field.

That result is one Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina can look upon with pride and more than a modicum of vainglory.  For then, she will have impressed her legacy upon generations of young and increasingly well-to-do Bangladeshis.  That vision of this poor, but promising country should be the unsettled dream of all Bangladeshi politicians.