challenge of intellectual capital development through higher education

Higher education is the engine of growth for any nation through intellectual capital formation. This imparts necessary knowledge and skills to the people enabling them to contribute towards national development. Higher education is more critical to the developing countries. Higher education can also be a means of social mobility through intellectual capital formation. This will be possible when education is market driven, effective, dynamic and accessible by all. Funding is central in both capacity building and facilitation of access to higher education. The conventional mode of public funding suffers from some inherent limitations in quality and quantity. Private funding tends to be expensive and inaccessible to the average citizens and poor. The middle ground is a quasi-public funding with participation of the stakeholders. Alternative funding to facilitate accessibility can be arranged through Knowledge Based Area Development (KBAD). Students can avail loans refundable after gainful employment. KBAD can be made sustainable through initial funding by the state, donor agencies, community and civil society. Community participation would impose a sense of responsibility to repay the loans which in turn would create pressure to make higher education relevant and marketable. Loans can enable people from every segment of the community to avail higher education. Bangladesh made attempt to ensure quality and increase accessibility by establishing non-government universities as of 1992. Yet finance hinders accessibility by the poor. IUBAT practices a seed-model of KBAD providing repayable loans to students enabling them to break out of poverty trap which if extended in wider scale in any society, could lead to community self reliance for national growth through cultivation of intellects

Keywords:

knowledge based area development , intellectual capital , migration , higher education , development