Photo: Collected
Today, Wednesday, is the 34th founding anniversary of the National University, the largest higher education institution in the country. To celebrate the day, banners have been put up on the buildings of the university’s main campus and city office, a special supplement has been published and a doa has been arranged at the central mosque.
This was stated in a press release of the university yesterday.
The release said the establishment of the National University through the passage of Act No. 37 in the great national parliament on 20 October 1992 and the gazette notification the following day was an epoch-making event in the history of higher education in Bangladesh. Under the leadership of the then prime minister, the uncompromising Deshnetri Begum Khaleda Zia, the university was established with the aim of expanding opportunities for higher education for the ordinary people of the country, reducing pressure on the existing universities and ensuring integrated management of college education at the district and upazila level.
Since its establishment, the institution has been playing a unique role in creating opportunities for higher education for young men and women of the country’s remote areas, particularly from middle-class, lower-middle-class and marginal families.
According to the release, nearly 40 lakh students are now studying at 2,318 affiliated colleges and educational institutions under the National University and more than one lakh teachers are employed there.
About 70 per cent of the country’s overall higher education is conducted under this university. The institution has so far produced more than one crore graduates, who are continuing to make important contributions to education, administration, business and commerce, technology and social development at home and abroad.
The release further said that to keep pace with a changing world and to meet the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution, the National University is working tirelessly to modernise the curriculum, widen the scope of teacher training programmes, remove session jams and increase opportunities for research activities.
The numbers
A comparison with the picture of two years ago makes the institution’s expansion clear. An article written by Sheikh Shohag Hossain, a lecturer of the law department of the National University, said that at that time the number of colleges affiliated with the university was more than two thousand and the students numbered more than 35 lakh; because of this expansion of affiliation, it is the third largest university in the world in terms of student numbers – The Business Standard published this on 2 November 2024.
At a glance
The main campus of the National University is in Gazipur. The same article said that session jams have remained a long-standing problem at the institution precisely because of delays in question moderation, script evaluation and the publication of results.
