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Large companies and industries in Bangladesh are not paying enough attention to building links with academic institutions, Education Minister A N M Ehsanul Haque Milan has said, stressing the need for closer cooperation between universities and industry to prepare students for the job market.
“Unfortunately, big companies and industries in our country do not give importance to academia-industry linkage,” he said.
The minister made the remarks as the chief guest at the MGI-MAA Scholarship 2026 distribution ceremony at the Nabab Nawab Ali Chowdhury Senate Building of Dhaka University on Wednesday morning.
Referring to his experience in China, Milan said universities and industries there maintain close links, with industrial engineers interacting directly with students while teachers from outside also teach them.
“Industry trains students, teaches them and recruits them directly. That is a linkage,” he said.
The minister also referred to Bangladesh’s earlier efforts to attract academics from abroad. In the 1980s, he said, foreign students from Malaysia studied at Dhaka University’s International Hostel, while then-president Ziaur Rahman had promoted the idea of “reverse brain drain”.
He said the idea was to encourage Bangladeshi professors working in the United States and other Western countries to return during their vacations and teach postgraduate students in Bangladesh.
Milan said Malaysia had successfully implemented a similar approach under former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and had since emerged as an education hub.
“Today Malaysia is an education hub, while we are sending our students to Malaysia,” he said, adding that Bangladesh had yet to introduce cross-border education through amendments to the Private University Act 1992.
“We are working on it and have a plan. We will also make Bangladesh an education hub,” he said.
The education minister also stressed the importance of job satisfaction and choosing work according to one’s interests.
He recalled seeing professors and vice-chancellors who said they might have been happier if they had remained involved in student organisations.
“If that was what they wanted to do, they should have gone there,” he said, adding that people should not force themselves into work they do not want to do.
“Job satisfaction is important. It does not matter what others have done; what matters is that you are satisfied with the work you are doing,” he said.
Milan said education had been given the highest priority by the government and that the sector had received Tk 1.36 lakh crore in the current year’s budget. He said the allocation would continue at up to 5 percent of GDP.
Recalling a recent visit to the MBA Department of the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), he said he was impressed by the use of smart projects and modern teaching methods.
“It’s quite different from what I studied and what is being taught now,” he said, adding that students returning from abroad with new knowledge would bring further changes to university teaching.
The scholarship programme was jointly organised by the Dhaka University Marketing Department Alumni Association and Meghna Group of Industries.
A total of 90 meritorious students from different batches of the Marketing Department received scholarships of Tk 24,000 each, amounting to Tk 21.6 lakh in total.
