Bangladesh's OBE Quality Trap Stifles Academics

When policymakers and bureaucrats from Bangladesh’s Ministry of Education and University Grants Commission (UGC) met with more than 60 vice-chancellors for a two-day dialogue on “shaping the future of higher education” in August, the rhetoric was predictably grand.

The air was filled with lofty proclamations regarding the establishment of a “Higher Education Academy”, digital transformation and AI integration, academia-industry collaboration, graduate employability and curriculum reform. Proposals were also made to build language centres at about 30 universities to enhance global competitiveness and attract more international students. And a “National Agenda for Sustainable Excellence” was approved, which foresees Bangladesh doubling its output of research publications and patents by 2030.

Yet beneath this glossy, technocratic aspiration lies a stark reality: the rapid massification of Bangladesh’s higher education sector – now encompassing 56 public and 116 private universities – has rendered degrees easily accessible but has left millions of graduates unemployed and the country’s many development challenges unaddressed.

To fix this structural mismatch, a new curriculum framework has been aggressively enforced. Outcome-based education (OBE) was originally prescribed by the World Bank as part of a 20-year strategic plan to enhance higher education that ends this year. It was promoted under the neoliberal banner of establishing a “quality culture”, but this Western-imported framework has, in reality, become what we call a “quality regime”: a suffocating, punitive, one-size-fits-all compliance exercise that is squeezing out academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge.

This systemic failure is a classic manifestation of what political scientist Lant Pritchett terms isomorphic mimicry – a process whereby an institution adopts the outward forms of successful foreign organisations to gain international legitimacy while utterly lacking the internal capacity to make them functional. It is an archetypal manifestation of what Pritchett’s colleague at the London School of Economics, Michael Power, calls the audit society. The substance of teaching and learning has been displaced by the frantic production of measurable data.

In the market-oriented private universities, the OBE framework has been weaponised as a corporate management tool. In the name of “customer satisfaction” and employability metrics, academics – who have enormous teaching loads and are not allowed to join a union – are obliged to spend their weekends mapping granular course objectives and learning outcomes and filling out endless compliance spreadsheets for regulatory audits.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire famously critiqued the “banking concept” of education, whereby students are treated as empty accounts into which teachers deposit static fragments of information. OBE merely updates this oppressive paradigm for the neoliberal era. By prescribing rigid, predetermined “outcomes” before a class even begins, it strips the classroom of spontaneity and co-creation. It treats students as standardised economic units to be processed for the market, rather than informed critical citizens capable of transforming society.

Academics at public universities are as underpaid and overburdened as their private-sector colleagues. And their institutions are all forced to adopt the same rigid templates despite lacking basic teaching infrastructure, manageable student-to-teacher ratios, student support services and well-equipped classrooms.  

Worse, while in practice all Bangladeshi universities are teaching-intensive, teaching performance hardly counts in faculty promotions. Instead, publication metrics – article and citation counts – are what matters. This means that academics are more concerned about publishing articles, even in predatory journals, than putting effort into teaching or mentoring students.

Nor are many of those articles making any meaningful contribution to addressing Bangladesh’s unique socio-economic challenges. Genuine local impact takes too much time and effort and isn’t valued by the international journals the academics are incentivised to publish in.

In short, academics across Bangladesh have been transformed into low-level managers and clerks, sacrificing their personal lives and thinking spaces in order to produce paper trails that vice-chancellors and politicians can falsely equate with excellent education – to adorn their websites and satisfy international lenders.

The OBE framework ignores a fundamental truth: not all academics, programmes, disciplines or universities in Bangladesh are equipped to comply with this uniform straitjacket. Nor should they be. It is an act of pedagogical violence to force the same bureaucratic mould on a theoretical physics department at a premier public university, a four-year humanities programme run by a college under a National University, and a business or an engineering school at a private university.  

What is the solution?

First, universities must be allowed to create distinct teaching and research tracks, allowing academics to excel according to their strengths, rather than forcing them to be hyper-productive managers, teachers and researchers all at once. Faculty who choose the teaching track would focus more on pedagogy and impactful interactive classroom activities, while those choosing the research track would be given freedom, time and adequate funding to engage in quality research that will have social impact.

That research track would be especially important if Bangladesh were to designate a class of research-intensive universities, as it should – although a mixed track could also be introduced for those academics who excel across the board.

Second, regulators and universities must move away from the audit illusion and toward an organic model of institutional trust, balancing autonomy and creativity with academic excellence and accountability.

True educational quality cannot be audited into existence through a World Bank blueprint. The UGC must replace rigid, metric-driven compliance with a flexible peer-review framework that values qualitative impact, local relevance and pedagogical innovation over performative box-ticking.

Sheikh Nahid Neazy is an associate professor in the department of English at Stamford University Bangladesh, Dhaka.