THINKING Cap

Cost/Benefit analysis of foreign tertiary education

The youth in this country have always had an insatiable hunger for higher education and this was specially so after they realized the value of modern education with the introduction of free education in 1945. The irony however of free education is, although it has popularized education in general it has not been able to accommodate all the aspiration for higher education among the youth in this country.

This is because even though the nation felt obliged to educate everybody in general, when it came to tertiary education which is premium education, the national policy had a limiting factor of 'national requirement', mainly due to resource constrains.

This, over the years has brought about two pressing anomalies in our present education system and the first among those is the breakneck competition the youth of this country has to undergo to enter a local University. The other is the flight of thousands of youth to foreign universities to fulfill their educational aspirations that cannot be addressed locally, due to the country's present policy on higher education.

Although this appears a 'reasonable and logical' course of action at the outset, the inherent ramifications of this process brings a loss that the country could ill afford, socially, academically and economically.

Every year, on an average, 10,000 youths from affluent to middle class families go abroad to fulfill their academic and professional ambitions and the country spends Rs. 4.6 billion of its valuable foreign exchange value to support them in foreign universities. All this is done in the name of 'investment' in education to enrich the country's intellectual stock; but in real practical terms, what is the cost/ benefit analysis to the country of this expensive exercise?

Most students who go abroad for education feel obliged to financially make good the enormous expenses they incurred for their education and hence look for avenues to earn money after completing higher education.

To do this, most of them are compelled to rough out in illegal and under employed situations for years in their hosts countries. The point here is that the curricular they have followed are more suitable to the academic requirements of those countries and in any case they, being persons who assess their educational cost at the 'developed' level would be beyond a Sri Lankan salary that is necessarily at 'developing' level.

Given this scenario, and with time, the candidate who went to obtain education, gets assimilated in to the social and economic mainstream of the host country and starts to view his future in terms of what the host country has to offer him. Further with marriage and with children, who know of no other values beyond what they have been born to, they become permanent citizens of the country where they came to obtain higher education. The irony here is that at the end, a developing country like Sri Lanka has gifted a qualified professional or an academic to a developed country, after having fully paid for his primary, secondary and tertiary education. This indeed is a bargain for any developed country, whose youth are less motivated for academic accomplishments, saddled with ageing population due to falling fertility rates.

This, in a way, is yet another dividend of their 'colonial master' legacy and a corresponding loss to us due to our 'colonial subject' legacy!

Education however is a fundamental right of all, irrespective, not only of ethnicity and gender, but even of intelligence and financial affordability. But the incongruity here is that Sri Lanka, being a small country that has demonstrated this message loud and clear to the world, with its free and fair education policy, now finds itself in a situation where its resources are being drained out in the name of 'higher education'.

This is because, the country's present free education system stops short of being free right upto the highest education level.

If the argument here is just that the country neither can afford nor needs such a luxury: then how come the country is going through this enormous loss of talent and foreign exchange in the name of higher education? If the Government cannot afford free higher education for all why not allow them to have their higher education locally at a suitable price.

Doesn't this policy then, of not having private universities in this country while permitting students to go abroad for studies, looks a policy, based on convoluted logic and, practised at an enormous loss to the country?

Yes, there is some thinking in this country that these private universities are a form of Upadi Kada (Degree awarding shops). If a university becomes a 'Degree Shop' merely because it does not admit the cream of the free education system, then by that same logic all the renowned universities in this world have to be castigated as 'Degree shops'.

What these champions of 'anti private university' campaign fail to realize is that by their very campaign they are impinging on the ordinary student's right to have higher education even at a price.

Is it only the creame of intelligentsia that is entitled to higher education and then what about the rest who become suitable to enter a university but left behind due to the competition?

The JVP has consistently opposed changes in the current university structure because the system as it has provided them with the strongest political base over the years.

If they are so genuine about the ‘free education’ why are they not blinking at the private tuition malaise that is eating in to the nation’s cultural, ethical and social ethos; and why are these International schools not called the ‘education shops’ (Adyapana Kada)? What the JVP has to realize is that they have no ethical right against the Government’s desire to accommodate the aspirations of every youth in this country, who obtains minimum criteria to enter the University.

President Rajapaksa recently declared in one of his many pronouncements that the priority in his second term would be for education. That is a right statement, for reforming education amounts to a silent revolution and has to be the basis of national renaissance.