The annual release of global university league tables triggers widespread anxiety in Bangladesh over the performance of the country’s higher education institutions.

However, this annual panic ignores a fundamental truth. The parameters used by global rankers are structurally misaligned with the socio-economic mandates and material realities of many developing nations. They rely on Eurocentric metrics such as high international faculty ratios and appearances in specific citation databases that penalise developing nations. They heavily reward historical reputation and wealth – which allows the Western and East Asian universities that have it in abundance to hire leading international faculty.

To expect public universities in a climate-vulnerable, lower-middle-income nation to compete on equal terms with such institutions is an exercise in futility, guaranteed to frustrate and burn out their academics. Worse still, it is a bad case of misplaced priorities. Bangladesh does not need universities that mimic those in the Global North to secure a marginally higher place on an international scorecard. It requires a higher education ecosystem that is unapologetically geared towards meeting national development targets – and a domestic ranking that is contextualised accordingly.

India’s National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) offers a strong precedent. Rather than commissioning global reputation surveys and poring over research citation databases, the NIRF allocates significant weight to “teaching-learning resources”, “graduation outcomes” and “outreach and inclusivity”. It evaluates how effectively an institution elevates students from historically marginalised backgrounds, turning higher education into an instrument of social mobility rather than an exclusive club for the elite.

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Similarly, Malaysia’s SETARA rating system, overseen by the Malaysian Qualification Agency (MQA), classifies institutions by their specific institutional mandates, distinguishing between vocational, university-college and research-intensive tracks. This ensures that a specialised technical college is not penalised for failing to produce theoretical physics citations, but is instead rewarded for delivering high-quality, industry-ready graduates.

China’s academic ascendancy followed a similar, state-directed trajectory. Before Chinese universities dominated global rankings, Beijing focused resolutely on domestic developmental metrics, heavily subsidising research that targeted national industrial bottlenecks, agricultural resilience and domestic technology transfer. Global recognition has been a by-product of this domestic strengthening, not its primary driver.

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Bangladesh’s University Grants Commission (UGC) – or, better still, a Higher Education Commission (HEC) that is entirely independent from the ministry and focused on university quality rather than compliance – must follow this example and establish a national evaluation framework built on five locally responsive pillars.

1. Developmental utility and local innovation. A paper published in a regional journal on delta management, low-cost saline-resistant agriculture, or urban dengue mitigation could have a huge importance in Bangladesh even if the journal isn’t indexed in Scopus or the Web of Science. A national framework must incentivise such papers rather than dismiss them as worthless by rewarding local patents and policy papers adopted by the state.
2. Socio-economic inclusivity. A university’s true merit in a developing nation lies in its democratic accessibility. This metric would reward institutions that actively enrol first-generation learners, youths from climate-displaced families and students from rural or underprivileged areas.
3. Market alignment and graduate survival rate. Rather than relying on subjective employer reputation surveys, Bangladesh requires hard data on graduate destinations. The framework must track the percentage of alumni securing meaningful employment or launching viable enterprises within six months of graduation, forcing a co-design of curricula with local industries.��
4. Pedagogical integrity over global aesthetics. Rather than counting international students and faculty, Bangladesh needs metrics evaluating actual faculty-student interaction hours, laboratory functionality, and continuous teacher training. Impactful teaching should be the top priority.��
5. Regional and community impact. Universities must not exist as ivory towers insulated from their immediate geography. Institutions should be audited on how effectively their faculties address local community challenges, from engineering departments assessing municipal waste systems, environmental science departments dealing with environment pollution or climate vulnerability, to humanities departments dealing with social problems and civic engagements.��

Of course, the success of the local evaluation system depends on academic integrity, intellectual freedom and institutional autonomy with sufficient funding for research facilities – all factors that Bangladesh needs to work on. And, of course, there are many factors��that cannot be measured or quantified properly. But perception is very important in rankings. If the overall point is that local impact is more important than global prestige, universities and policymakers will act accordingly.��

Defining domestic quality on our own terms would force the state to allocate scarce capital efficiently. When funding, prestige and national survival are tied to local utility, universities will stop spending resources on chasing low-impact global publications or recruiting token international academics – who often only teach here during the summer semester. Instead, they will invest in local labs, affordable tuition and community-facing projects.

A rigorous National Evaluation Framework would allow Bangladesh to transition from being a passive consumer of foreign standards to an active architect of its own intellectual future. True academic excellence lies not in climbing league tables devised in London or Shanghai but in serving the local community – or society at large.

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Sheikh Nahid Neazy is associate professor of the department of English at Stamford University Bangladesh, in Dhaka. He can be contacted at nahidneazy@yahoo.com.