The government is trying to use this situation to justify its private university project by claiming that fee levying institutions will provide the students who fail to gain admission to national universities with an alternative. This argument is seriously flawed, to say the least. Only a handful of beneficiaries of free education could afford to pay for education at private universities, here or abroad. Almost all undergraduates are dependent on Mahapola grants and those who have been left out of the race are in the same predicament. They are the children of ordinary people struggling to make ends meet.
More than nine per cent of Sri Lankans are affected by hearing impairments, according to a medical expert quoted in a news item we published yesterday. One wonders whether most of them have taken to politics, going by the manner in which politicians turn a deaf ear to public requests.
No sooner had the government bungled the GCE A/L (2011) examination results by messing up the Z-score calculation, several experts requested it to increase university admissions so as to prevent its blunders from causing injustice to students. It did not give two hoots about their request and adopted a confrontational approach. There is reason to believe that the government had known the solution all along but did not want to implement it; Higher Education Minister S. B. Dissanayake and his top bureaucrats may have thought they would be able to bluff their way out of trouble without conceding defeat.
A few months on, they have had to swallow their pride and do exactly what they did not want to do initially! The Supreme Court has accepted the UGC’s compromise formula and directed it to admit 4,928 more students to universities this year. Those who moved the apex court against the government and fought quite a battle for the sake of voiceless children deserve praise.
The Z-score imbroglio kept students and parents on tenterhooks for months and led to a considerable erosion of public faith in the university entrance examination. However, the results mess-up has apparently turned out to be a blessing in disguise in that the government has had to increase the intake of university students. Its compromise formula has given the lie to its claim that no more students could be admitted to universities, which it insisted, were bursting at the seams.
True, the government has, to its credit, increased university admissions over the years and the universities are faced with numerous problems that prevent their full potential being tapped. But, for a government that boasts of constructing harbours, highways, tunnels, flyovers in record time, putting in place infrastructure at universities to cater to the growing demand for higher education should be child’s play. As for human resources, if better salaries are paid to university dons, the government will be able not only to hire more teachers but also to demand that the tutorial staff work harder to step up their productivity and raise university standards.
At present, only about one third of students who qualify for higher education are admitted to universities. This is nothing but a crime. The government is trying to use this situation to justify its private university project by claiming that fee levying institutions will provide the students who fail to gain admission to national universities with an alternative. This argument is seriously flawed, to say the least. Only a handful of beneficiaries of free education could afford to pay for education at private universities, here or abroad. Almost all undergraduates are dependent on Mahapola grants and those who have been left out of the race are in the same predicament. They are the children of ordinary people struggling to make ends meet.
Although there’s no gainsaying that a country needs private higher education institutions which conform to the standards prescribed by the State, the government’s priority should be to develop national universities. By denying a vast majority of successful GCE A/L candidates access to higher education, successive governments have not only made a mockery of free education but also violated students’ fundamental rights. The question is whether a free education system where over two thirds of students who obtain enough marks to pursue higher education are left out for no fault of theirs is worthy of the name.
The promised increase in university admissions must not be a one-off. Now that the government has admitted before the Supreme Court that universities could accommodate more students albeit with difficulty, it must not be allowed to reduce admissions to the previous level even after the problems caused by the Z-score mess-up are sorted out. The increase must stay.
Source: http://www.island.lk/
