Online Desk: Education Minister Mohibul Hasan Chowdhury Nowfel has said new universities shouldn’t burden themselves with running undergraduate-level courses at the start of their journey

“Why are the new universities conducting undergraduate courses from the start? Undergraduate courses of the government colleges should be monitored and postgraduate courses will be done separately by the university,” he said.

The minister said this while exchanging views with Bangladesh Bishwabidyalay Parishad, an organization of vice-chancellors of public universities, at the auditorium of the International Mother Language Institute in the capital’s Segunbagicha on Monday.

The start is a challenging time for a new university, the education minister said. “We should do research development from there with a full setup.”

Nowfel said in 2014, the prime minister asked to ensure academic monitoring by bringing all colleges or centenary colleges under the respective university. He advised the vice-chancellors of all public universities to take steps in this regard.

“The Open University is monitoring non-formal education across the country, then why can’t Chittagong University monitor Chittagong College? Once upon a time, it did. If there was the capacity to do it before, then now the system should increase further.

“Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina herself has included seven colleges in Dhaka University on her own initiative. There may be challenges there, too. We are overcoming that challenge. Students blocked the road. But we didn’t move,” he said.

“The quality of the seven colleges has improved. If Dhaka University can work on academic standard monitoring, why can’t other universities?” He indicated that the ministry will do so if the law is to be amended in these cases.

Referring to the prime minister’s directives, the education minister said all the universities are at the district level, the government colleges in those districts, their academies will do the work of monitoring.