Higher Education Budget for Human Resource Development: Bangladesh Perspective

Abstract

The present study is concentrated on higher education budget, its allocation, implementation, and utilization for human resource development (HRD) in Bangladesh. The study also strives to discover the financial and nonfinancial challenges of higher education budget for HRD and to find out the ways to overcome those challenges. The core objective of the study is to analyze higher education budget against local, regional, and global benchmarks. Utilization of higher education budget is dependant variable, while session jam in higher educational institutions, unemployment, and employment nature of higher educated people are three major independent variables of the study. The study is based on both secondary and primary sources of data. Secondary data has been collected from different published sources and primary data has been collected through responses of semi structured questionnaire form 557 alumnae of the public universities who are in job required non-technical entry qualifications and from 63 faculties of public universities in Bangladesh. Collected data has been edited, coded and tabulated in a methodical way. Monetary value has been converted into current value of money based on consumer price index (CPI) of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). Descriptive statistics such as frequency, mean, mode, standard deviation (SD), co-efficient of variation, range, minima, maxima and inferential statistics such as ANOVA, sample mean t-test, Chisquare test along with charts and diagrams have been used to analyze data and to find out results. All the statistical analyses have been conducted with the help of Microsoft Excel and SPSS 15 version.

Empirical results demonstrate that the trend of revenue budget allocation on education and UGC grants to public university budget (percentage) in Bangladesh have been decreasing gradually over the period. Public expenditure of higher education as percentage of GDP and government expenditure have been far below than the suggested norms of different Education Commissions in Bangladesh since independence and also the practices of South Asian countries. More discouraging is that the public universities in Bangladesh are spending a notable amount from undisclosed or unidentified or unexplained sources, which is a sheer violation of budget manual. This situation suggests lack of transparency in budget execution. Another most revealing feature of public university budget is that the major portion of the budget has been spent for salaries and pension (about three fourths) where as only one-tenth for education contingencies. Major part (about three fourth) of education contingencies exhausted for exam related expenses and remaining part for education expenses & students’ facilities as against a negligible amount of total budget has been spent for research, fellowship and scholarship during the whole period of review. Expenses on major sub-heads of education contingencies are significantly dissimilar among different categories of universities. Human resource development scenario in Bangladesh is also in a very poor shape compare to other South Asian countries, least developed and developing countries. There is a high positive correlation between national education budget and HDI value of Bangladesh. The adult literacy rate of Bangladesh is lower than the average of least developed countries and South Asian average, not to talk of World average.

High unemployment rate is a reality in Bangladesh. A large part of higher education budget has been unproductive mainly because of short-term and long-term unemployment and Bangladesh has been deprived of getting the services from those unemployed higher educated people. On the other hand session jam has been creating extra financial pressure on the government and on the guardians. Students are delayed to start their working life and consequently, the country is deprived of getting the services from the graduates for the period of session jam. Job nature has a pressure on utilization of budget. Technical graduates usually consume 3 to 5 times more money than the general graduates and as such about half of the government expense against any technical graduate is an unproductive investment when s/he works in nontechnical job. Insufficient budget allocation is one of the main budgetary challenges for higher education in Bangladesh. Similarly, inappropriate utilization of budget due to session jam, unemployment and job nature of higher educated people is also a major challenge for higher education budget. There are some other challenges such as lack of appropriate plan and its proper implementation, slavish national politics in higher educational institutions, importance of political identity over merit while selecting as well as promoting academic and nonacademic staff, assigning different charges to them, abuse of public university autonomy, and also absence of quality research, etc. Unmatched between expected and actual study area and or study discipline decreased the interest of the students in higher education. Similarly, unmatched between expected and present job is obstacle to utilized working ability of higher

educated employee fully. All these are indirect challenges of higher education budget in Bangladesh. Higher education of Bangladesh is not standard enough to meet the local and international standard. Consequently, unemployed higher educated people are increasing gradually. To defeat all direct and indirect challenges of budget for higher education, budgetary allocation should be increased to a rational level and proper implementation of the same following budget manual should be ensured. Special emphasis should be given on the allocation for research, fellowship and scholarship and create an environment for quality research. Some alternative sources of finance such as arranging loan for students, strengthening relationship with scholarship providers, involving professors in consultancy, research projects, research grant etc in addition to government grant and tuition fees should be looked for by the public universities in Bangladesh to alleviate extra pressure on their budget.