International Standard University aims to provide social service through quality education with moral values. This university ensures its aim to achieve excellence as a seat of learning through devotion, hard work, and sincerity.
We have worked almost round the clock to ensure that the university makes some remarkable progress during the period of the impasse.
With the tremendous support and commitment provided by the Board of Trustees (BoT) and academic and administrative members, we have explored and created various ways to continue innovation and quality pertinent to education and research by collaborating with diverse industries and authorities, such as Standard Group Ltd, University Grants Commission of Bangladesh (UGC), Bangladesh Accreditation Council (BAC), and associated academic institutions and several corporate institutions.
We have retained and developed the university's capacity to invest in students, teaching, and research activities.
We have also supported and nurtured the careers and well-being of the students by creating enormous platforms for career progression, and development to maximise their capabilities; stimulating outstanding research, and innovation that fully supports the well-being of students.
Students who are desirous of being admitted into private universities try to find the right university that will ensure their proper education in their desired discipline at a level of cost their guardians can bear. At ISU, we ensure both in a student-friendly environment, taken good care of by the authority.
The female students prefer ISU because they (i) are ensured a safe environment on the campus and (ii) are also allowed a 10 per cent additional waiver on their tuition fees.
Also, most of the programmes are so designed that the graduates passing out from ISU can adapt themselves to their practical life situations in the industry.
A good number of courses are being taught by faculty members with industrial backgrounds.
Moreover, the provision of lab facilities and internship programmes before graduation help acquaint ISU graduates with the industrial environment. Frequent industrial visits are also arranged for the students of Business, Science, and Engineering.
ISU is currently undertaking policy-oriented research in the spheres of business, development, literature, computing research, clothing and textile, and environmental issues in general.
These are taking up state functionaries, business corporations, and other key decision-makers in the public, private, and development sectors to develop well-informed and intelligent decisions.
The research activities involve baseline research and consultancies which have been designed to be funded by different public and private agencies, as well as by development organisations.
The university is undertaking in collaboration with other reputable agencies, based in Bangladesh and other parts of the world. In doing so, it maintains local and global collaborations with a wide range of scholarly academia and industries.
The day-to-day operations of the university’s research aim to be performed under the supervision of the director of the Centre for Research, Development, and Publications (CRDP). Additionally, ISU is focusing on a range of research, for instance, socio-economic development, food security and sustainable development, artificial intelligence, innovative human management processes, and the socio-economic impact of Covid-19.
ISU is shedding light on motivating academic staff and students to involve themselves in research activities besides academic responsibilities. Thus, the university has created a platform at national and international levels with aims at leading scholars, universities, and relevant industries.
In so doing, it establishes a theoretical and practical foundation for a high standard of educational process and educational research. ISU regularly offers research training courses and serves as a source of training to develop the capacity and experience of Bangladeshi or foreign consulting firms.
The university has produced three scholarly journals; for instance, the Journal of Business and Development Studies (JBDS), the Journal of English Studies (JES), and the Journal of Engineering and Technology (JET) to facilitate faculty members and students for publishing cutting-edge research works.
If anyone asks whether education migration can be reduced by the existing education system at private universities or not, then the answer would be a big “yes.”
All of us should remember that in the late eighties and early nineties (i.e., from 1985 to 1995) a large exodus of undergrad students from our country migrated to India and Western countries for higher education.
The push factor was the creation of a huge session jam in the tertiary level of education in the country, especially in the then-public universities. As I recall, in 1992 alone more than 10,000 (ten thousand) students left for Indian universities.
The emergence of private universities in Bangladesh performed a wonderful job of ameliorating the situation and by 1996; the level of student migration came down to almost zero.
It was a great success of the private universities in their efforts to ensure quality education most effectively, thereby providing a remedy to the crisis of severe session jams in public universities and solving the national problem of large-scale migration for higher studies abroad.
By now, it has been well established as a fact that the tertiary-level students of our country find our private universities as their destination for quality education and thus their craving for foreign universities is almost gone.
Prof Dr Abdul Awal Khan is the Vice-Chancellor of the International Standard University
