The Decay of University Education in Sri Lanka

What is it about?

This is a critical analysis of and critical reflections on the Performance Audit Report (PAR) of the National Audit Office on the arts stream education at senior secondary school and university undergraduate level in Sri Lanka. The PAR claims that arts stream education has failed to produce employable graduates because the curriculum is academic-oriented rather than skills oriented. This rejoinder to the PAR argues that the university education is failing to produce employable graduates because it is neither academic-oriented nor skills-oriented due to both the institutional decay of the public universities in Sri Lanka as well as the decay of individuals, especially the academic staff, in the public universities in Sri Lanka in the last 50 years or so (1972-2021).

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Why is it important?

Public investments in higher education in Sri Lanka have hitherto focussed on solely increasing access to higher/tertiary education year after year with the neglect of the quality of such higher education. This neglect has resulted in increasing graduate unemployment, especially among graduates from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and commercial and management streams. In order to address the unemployability of these graduates the quality of undergraduate education in particular and tertiary education in general should be improved immediately.

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