Private University Education Should Be Within A Sound Quality Assurance Framework

By Athula Samarakoon

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) held a World Conference on Higher Education in 1998 in Paris under the  title ‘Higher Education in the 21st Century: Vision and Action.’ Sri Lanka was represented by the former Minister of Higher Education Prof. Viswa Warnapala who argued that as a country Sri Lanka was lagging behind the growth of higher education being unable to cater to the increasing social demand.
Need for Pragmatic Policy Framework without Rhetoric

Prof. Warnapala’s remarks in the conference summarised the issues connected with higher education into three major areas, namely; ‘unsatisfied social demand for university education, problem of unemployment of university graduates, and the resource constraint’.
It is in fact ironical that the Minister who spoke of these major issues facing the publicly funded University system in Sri Lanka was not re-nominated under the national list for a second term. However, the current Minister of Higher Education Mr. S.B. Dissanayake has begun to talk about reforms in this sector; especially the expansion of the university education by establishing private universities in Sri Lanka.
On the one hand Minister S.B. Dissanayake has been so adventurous to re-initiate the dialogue on private universities whereas the previous Ministers of Higher Education lacked the libidinal power to take on the issue due to the fear of public outrage, since the assumption is that the government alone should provide education up to the undergraduate level from taxpayers’ money. Also the vehement opposition by the university undergraduates and the leftist political parties always compelled governments to hold back the liberalisation project relating to this sector.

Open Economy with a closed mindset has also been a problem

Despite Sri Lanka’s early entry in to the open market economy in the late 1970s, the education system of the country has remained a monopoly of the public sector. University even after colonial rule remained as an elite implantation to take forward the ideological stances of the empire in post-independent Sri Lanka. Since 1956, the medium of instruction was also changed in to vernacular Sinhala and Tamil and we would hypothetically state that the endeavour to indigenise the university education in many ways has been a major contributor towards problems we confront today.
It is a reasonable assumption that any person with a necessity and qualifications must have access to higher education. In the case of Sri Lanka’s public university system only 2% of the qualified people are absorbed, while 98% of them have to seek foreign education, obtain an external degree, join an open distance education centre like the Open University or give up their dreams of higher education. Without a proper policy on expansion of higher education sector for the 21st century, no government is in a position to cater to the increasing demand for its products. Any arbitrary attempt at privatising this sector without a clearly mapped out policy, a vision and a mission, the current Minister’s bold ideas would not bear fruit.
The Need to take the Professional Community into Confidence in Restructuring Initiatives
As we have already sensed, Sri Lanka’s higher education sector has lost its enamel applied during the colonial era. However, it is useless to preserve the same structure without proper reforms and the government should use the best minds within the university sector to achieve the new restructuring objectives.
If Ceylon had a reputation for higher education inspiring Singapore and many other countries in the region, today Sri Lanka is not and there are good reasons for this having surrendered the values that were cherished in the days of Sir Ivor Jennings. Also, the degeneration of the university education in a vacuum of competition from any other institute and lack of trained human and physical resources has brought us to the conjecture that the state owned monopoly of higher education has been a failure in Sri Lanka. To make matters worse, the system has been politicised with the administration of the system given to those with partisan loyalties.
Minister S.B. Disanayake himself has realised this and he has proposed meaningful resource mobilisation as one step for restoring the system. Also the recent display of protests by the University academics for a salary increase point to the fact that lack of well trained academics in our university system is due to the poor salaries paid to them. If in the first place, the government thinks of the quality of the university education imparted, the qualified staff should be the priority and for that a better remuneration package should be on offer in line with professional dignity.
Poor Remuneration also affects the culture of Research among the Academia
A major aspect of today’s discourse on the university education in Sri Lanka leads us to question the relevance and quality of education. University as the centers of dissemination and production of knowledge must give their priority for academic research which is the least expected thing from Sri Lankan academics fighting for economic survival of all things. Sri Lanka’s university education is mainly confined to the undergraduate education whereas the other countries in the region such as neighbouring India have enormously assisted the public and private universities in their research endeavours. In spite of all these constraints, our academics continue to do their best in their chosen fields.
The basic degree holders in the fields of arts and humanities as well as natural sciences study in their mother tongue and not in English. This has been regarded as a burden by those who emphasise on the employability of the degree holders. However, the students in non-professional fields like arts and humanities would be in a position to increase their employability if they study in the English medium which indirectly helps them to improve their soft skills and gain other competencies.
Urgency is to do Justice to the Existing National Universities
The suggestion that Sri Lanka should switch to private higher education while the problems of the public universities remain unresolved is not acceptable. The fist priority of the state is to upgrade the quality of the education disseminated by the public universities which absorb the cream of the best performing students. In doing that, the government should make a greater investment on higher education in order to pay better salaries for academics, provide better facilities for students in terms of hostels, libraries, ITC, and introduce English medium education.
The students from the economically backward sections of the society has no other option than joining a public university through high competition, and if the government allows further degeneration of existing universities citing ‘resource constraints’ and open up private universities in an arbitrary manner  that would be the start of another insurrectionary movement with acute radicalisation of youth sentiments.
Private higher education should not provide a license to pervert the spirit. While accepting that the economically backward and talented students must be given high priority, it should also be understood that a state should design policies for all the sections of society. The meaning of ‘private’ should not be a patent for earning profit by making education another commodity. In USA, many privately owned universities are non-profit institutions and they provide a considerable amount of scholarships for talented and economically backward students.
Also in India, private initiatives are always encouraged and governments assist them as the state is not in position to cater to the huge social demand for higher education. It is always important that the state retains all the regulatory powers in terms of quality assurance, selection of students and designing of fees in case of private universities being established here. Without such measures, already several private initiatives are operating in the country offering foreign degrees. However, there has been no mechanism to guarantee the quality of the education they provide at higher fees. That is why it is important to create a regulatory mechanism which is linked to the Ministry of Higher Education to regulate the behaviour of institutions yet to be established.
Haphazard thoughts and weak policy foundations inspired by ethno-nationalist elements should end. Sri Lanka could have been the hub of higher education in the region if it had a clear policy from the beginning after independence. Today, the competition that we are facing from regional friends like India, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia in the higher education sector is immense. Those countries have maintained a vibrant sector of public universities and let the private universities to compete with them. Sri Lanka only offers a story of subjecting the higher education sector to ethno-nationalist and religious biases whereas they should have let these institutions flourish as the centres of liberal ideas and knowledge without much state involvement, other than maintaining them physically.
The private universities cannot be the panacea for all the ailments our system is facing, but it should be used as a tactic to revive and restore the legacy of University education that we had some decades ago, probably before the so-called vernacularisation of education. Finally, ‘higher education is a service in the public interest whether publicly or privately funded’ and must be enclosed by a sound public policy which assures the public responsibility in catering to the greater demand for higher education.
(The writer is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Open University of Sri Lanka with an M.A and an M.Phil in International Politics from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India)