By Kaushalya Perera
With more interest in the quality of higher education in Sri Lanka than ever before, and with a pandemic forcing far-reaching changes, this is an opportune time to discuss what quality means for university education.
Quality in state universities
Mention quality in higher education and attention inevitably veers to the state universities functioning under the University Grants Commission (UGC). The foremost complaint about graduates of these universities is their ‘unemployability’. Successive governments and the World Bank have, rather simplistically, equated unemployability with low English proficiency and low computer literacy. Unions and educationists have critiqued this argument, and pointed to the lack of state investment in education as a major reason for their weaknesses. However, from the government’s point of view, the ‘employable’ graduate is to be produced not through state funds (education received a mere 2.1% of GDP in 2018), but through