Six Percent of the GDP for
Education
| by Jayadeva Uyangoda
Member, Arts Faculty Teachers’
Union- Colombo
( October 3, 2012, Colombo, Sri
Lanka Guardian) The demand made by the FUTA for increased allocation of annual
government expenditure on education has now emerged as a national policy
slogan, with many sectors of society adopting it as their own demand. This is a
key achievement made by the FUTA in its three-month long struggle.
Some, even those in the
government, are now asking how this 6% of GDP allocation should be spent.
Understandably, government ministers in charge of the subject of education and
even some Vice-Chancellors seem to be rather confused about how such an
allocation could conceivably be spent. This is where all those who back the 6%
demand now have to propose to the government how the increased public money on
education should not be wasted and actually be productively utilized for the benefit
of our country’s education.
This opens up an unprecedented
opportunity for the stakeholders of education in Sri Lanka to further deepen
the public debate by focusing on what concrete steps should be taken to improve
all aspects of education – quality and standards of teaching, learning and
evaluation; infrastructure that includes buildings, class rooms, laboratories,
libraries, and even cafeteria; development of academic as well as non-academic
human resources; capacity building in administration and management; student
and staff welfare, bursaries and scholarships; text books; research and
publication. It should encompass school, technical, and university education
that come under the Ministry of Education as well as Higher Education.
Universities
One possible reason why the
minister and his officials seem to be perplexed by the FUTA demand for higher
allocation of government expenditure in the university system is that they are
not adequately familiar with the problems and needs in the higher education
sector. Their limited vision for higher education does not seem to go beyond
the task of maintaining the institutional status quo. Actually, to maintain the
present status quo in the universities, with annual allocations for usual
recurrent expenditure and limited amount of capital expenditure, substantially
higher allocations for universities will not be required at all. New funds are
needed to change the status quo, and to raise the quality and standards of Sri
Lanka’s higher education. That is the goal for which FUTA is campaigning.
Meanwhile, educational
policy-makers of our country also seem to share a rather limited understanding
of university problems, which is skewed towards issues such as student
indiscipline, ragging, and student violence. It is really doubtful whether
Vice-Chancellors, or other university officials, have the practice of briefing
the Ministers or the President about problems and needs that require greater
monetary allocation. The only problem in the universities they seem to be aware
of is student politics, ragging and violence, and trade union agitations by
FUTA. The rather expensive leadership training programme is their ill-conceived
response to this problem.
Interestingly, the government
seems to be committed to the goal of making Sri Lanka an internationally
competitive center of learning. If the government is serious about involving
the universities to play an active and dynamic role in the knowledge hub
project, there is an urgent need to make a massive capital investment to
improve, upgrade, and modernize and then maintain with sustainability the
entire university system in all its aspects. Years of neglect by governments as
well as university administrations has led the university system into a deep
crisis characterized by demoralization among students, as well as the academic
and non-academic staff, backward and decaying infrastructure, stagnation of
universities as mere undergraduate colleges, excessive reliance on political
patronage by university administrations, and now a mutually-hurting breakdown
of communication between the Ministry of Higher Education and the UGC on one
side, and academics, students and non-academic staff on the other side.
How should the 6% of the GDP be
spent? As the cliché goes, it is the million -dollar question, literally as
well as metaphorically. The answer is linked to the ways out from the
accumulated crisis from which the entire university system suffers. It is
obviously not up to the FUTA to propose unilaterally how much capital is required
for investment in different areas of the entire educational sector. That should
be a consultative exercise of planning for short-term, medium-term and
long-term university development to be undertaken by the Ministry of Higher
Education, in consultation not only with the UGC and university bureaucracies,
but also with teachers and students who have firsthand knowledge of many things
that the VCs and the UGC ignore, or take for granted, in accordance with their
professional culture of being committed to maintaining the institutional status
quo. The FUTA has raised the issue as an important public policy matter. To
take the policy debate to a higher level, stakeholders can now ideally identify
and propose priority areas into which public funds should move.
Let us identify some critical
areas that require urgent attention for improvement in our universities.
Infrastructure
Almost all the universities in
Sri Lanka, including the relatively new ones, have an outdated, inadequate, and
aging system of physical infrastructure, that includes buildings, class -
rooms, lecture halls, laboratories, libraries, not to mention the toilets and
cafeteria with appallingly unhygienic conditions. Peradeniya may be considered
an exception. Even the massive buildings that have been constructed relatively
recently, like the Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Law buildings at the
University of Colombo, are crumbling due to premature aging, precipitated by
low-quality construction, bad designing, and massive pressure emanating from
the ever increasing student population who use them. Classrooms, lecture halls
and even the university libraries, as a general practice, are both primitive in
terms of facilities they offer.
The elementary nature of the
infrastructure in our universities stands out in comparison with the
universities in other Asian countries of comparable economic status, such as
Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. Only a handful of classrooms
in our universities have audio-visual facilities, a must in modern methodology
of teaching. Even they are of exceedingly low quality. Furniture in classrooms
in general is of poor quality and inadequate to cater to increasing numbers of
students. Almost as a rule, classrooms, lecture halls, teachers’ office rooms,
and libraries continue to remain without air-conditioning facilities,
compelling students and teacher to sweat it out throughout the day, even all
these buildings, as the case of Colombo University vividly illustrates, have
been designed and built for air-conditioning. The reason offered by the
university authorities for not having air conditioning for classrooms, lecture
halls and libraries is the lack of financial allocations. The same explanation
is offered to the perpetuation of ever deteriorating hygienic and public health
facilities in the universities, which are used by thousands of students,
teachers, non-academic staff and visitors, day in day out.
The lack of adequate housing and
residential facilities for students is one of the most glaring dimensions in
the infrastructure crisis in our universities. Teachers don’t have housing
facilities either, except the limited residential facilities available at
Peradeniya University. Good universities all over the world provide subsidized
housing for its students, teachers and non-academic staff, but not in Sri
Lanka. The private houses leased in by universities as student hostels, even
those provided for student monks, are veritable "hell-halls" – dirty,
unhygienic, over-crowded, and liberally populated by rats, cockroaches and
mosquitoes. They are simply unfit for human habitation. Vice-Chancellors, UGC
members, Ministry Secretaries and Ministers are either unaware of these
sub-human conditions under which our university students live, or they are
professionally insensitive to these realities. An example to illustrate this
insensitivity, when a group of female undergraduate students complained to a VC
that the showers of their bathrooms did not have water for a few days, the VC
shot back asking whether these young women had bath showers in their village.
One student with a sense of humour humbly suggested to the VC to build a Weva
(irrigation tank) near their hostel!
Our university libraries need a
rapid increase in financial allocations, several times more than what they get
at present, to build and maintain their resources, facilities and services.
Except the library of University of Peradeniya with some past glory, all other
university libraries, including that of Colombo, do not actually qualify to be
university libraries. The libraries of the universities of Kelaniya,
Jayewardenepura, Ruhuna, Sabaragamuwa, Batticaloa, Jaffna and Oluvil, not to
mention others, are so poor in their stocks of books and academic journals that
one wonders why they are called university libraries, to begin with. In the
absence of a proper accreditation system to maintain standards of our
universities, libraries have become the first to suffer fund cuts among all the
units of the universities. For the past several decades, the university
libraries have not got enough annual grants to buy new books, and renew their
subscriptions to academic periodicals. Even the access to electronic databases,
in this age of cyber learning, is quite limited. As the library of university
Colombo amply testifies, without air conditioning or access to methods to
preserve documents which are rather expensive, valuable collections of old
books are left to rot and decay. When asked about this depressingly poor
conditions of the library of a university which claims to be the premier
university in Sri Lanka, the answer one gets is quite simple: "no
money." Sadly, library development, that requires new financial resources,
has not been for decades among the priorities of the VCs or the UGC.
It is no exaggeration to say that
the physical quality and the conditions of life shared by students, teachers
and non-academics within the premises of the Sri Lankan universities is
appallingly low. Actually, our universities are institutionalized microcosms of
generalized conditions of poverty, misery and squalor that continue to haunt
some segments of our society. No wonder that there are only a very few foreign
students volunteered to accept scholarships offered by the Ministry of Higher
Education to study in our universities. If the Minister of Higher Education
seriously expects foreign students to join universities, he needs to improve
the quality of physical and infrastructure conditions of all universities. The
reason is simple. Students of any country who usually go abroad for university
education, even on partial scholarships that the Minister has generally
offered, are from middle-class backgrounds, who have expectations of the
quality of life as students that are far ahead what our universities can offer
at present.
Academic Standards and Teaching
Programmes
One area where new injection of
capital of substantial proportions is urgently required is to start full-time
postgraduate programmes as an integral part of the university system in Sri
Lanka. None of our university faculties offer full-time Masters or Doctoral
causes as a component of their regular teaching programmes. Our universities
are actually not full universities; they are mere undergraduate colleges.
Limited numbers of post-graduate programmes are conducted by Faculties of
Graduate studies on the fee-levying basis with evening or weekend classes. Many
of them are not up to international standards and in fact poor in quality.
Their low quality is primarily due to the fact that they are part time courses.
Their participants are part-time students who have little or no time for
rigorous post-graduate learning or research.
The absence of regular and
full-time post-graduate courses has other negative consequences for the entire
intellectual culture of the universities. Teachers who engage only or mainly in
undergraduate teaching are hardly compelled to excel themselves as teachers or
researchers. Undergraduate students do not have the benefit of interacting with
Master’s or Doctoral students for intellectual stimulation. There is no stable
or sustainable culture of research and knowledge production built into the
university system either. The prevailing emphasis, as its has evolved since the
1940s, has been on the dissemination, not production, of knowledge through
undergraduate teaching. Research and publication has a low priority, because
teachers, even professors, spend most of their time and energy on conducting
undergraduate programmes. The UGC and the Universities do not have research funds,
except occasional allocations of small size. In the absence of a vibrant
research culture, there are hardly any applicants for even those funds from
Faculties other than Medical where research is built into the professional
careers of academics as medical practitioners. There is no adequate financial
support for regular research conferences or for publication of research papers
in the form of journals, books and edited anthologies. There is absolutely no
money available in the universities to publish post-graduate dissertations.
Those teachers with a commitment to research and publication are forced to seek
funding from non-university sources, or do their research in collaboration with
non-university research centres. Similarly, our universities do not have a
culture of assisting, through travel grants, teachers or research students in
their participation in international conferences or research symposia. ‘No
money" is once again the ready-made answer available to those who make
inquiries regarding such assistance.
What should the UGC and the
Ministry of Higher education do to change this situation? One policy option is
to re-orient the existing system so that our universities will become
universities in the fullest sense of the concept, with fulltime and regular
Masters and Doctoral programmes and post-graduate research, paralleled with
undergraduate degree courses. This requires allocation of quite a large amount
of financial resources to recruit new staff with doctoral qualifications,
expansion of libraries and laboratories with adequate facilities, setting up of
research centres, offering research fellowships to academics at home and
abroad, facilitating conferences and publications, provision of scholarships
and research grants to teachers as well as students, and finally, facilities
for publishing academic journals and books. These are minimally necessary
pre-requisites to make Sri Lankan universities internationally recognized
centres of excellence.
Human Resource Development
One major dimension of the
university crisis in Sri Lanka is the progressively decaying human resource
base in both academic and administrative spheres. Policy-makers seem to be
totally insensitive to this aspect of the crisis. Protests against the low
levels of salaries of the academic and non-academic staff are just one
manifestation of this crisis. The government’s ‘solution’ of promising and not
delivering pay hikes has not worked and it is unlikely to work in the future
either.
As the FUTA has repeatedly
pointed out, lack of academic cadre provisions for departments as well as the
inability to fill even the limited numbers of existing vacancies for academic
positions have created a serious erosion of the academic human resource base in
all of our universities. The inadequacy of cadre provisions for academic
departments is particularly felt in new universities such as Ruhuna,
Sabaragamuwa, Rajarata, East and South- East, which were established with
minimum cadre facilities. Some departments function with the help of temporary
teachers and visiting lecturers. The Medical Faculty of the Rajarata University
is a well-known case in point. With the expansion of student population, the
cadre base of the Faculties and Departments needs to be expanded even in older
universities such as Peradeniya and Colombo. This is a point made in
department, faculty and institutional evaluations conducted a few years ago
under the auspices of the IRQUE Project. Repeated requests made by Departments
and Faculties through VCs for more cadres have only been rejected by the UGC on
the excuse that the Treasury approval has not been granted. Even the UGC
decisions made a few years ago to create new cadre provisions have been
rejected by the Treasury. The explanation there too has been a simple one: "no
money."
The inability of the universities
to fill even the limited available vacancies, particularly at lower and middle
levels, is an issue highlighted by the FUTA. This is where the need for
immediate and substantial salary increases becomes crucial.
Why is a substantial expansion of
the academic cadre base of the universities needed? The simple answer is that
Sri Lanka needs a substantial increase in the opportunities to enter
universities, available to children who pass the A/L examination. The university
entrance, as the cliché goes, is the most serious bottleneck in the system of
education available to Sri Lankan children. Democratization of opportunities
for university education is a long-felt social need in Sri Lanka. The best
option available is to expand the existing universities, rather than setting up
new ones. To prevent further deterioration of the quality and standards at the
universities, an increase in the university academic cadre, with a commitment
to recruiting the best, is quite crucial.
Post-graduate training for junior
academics is an issue which the universities and other higher education
authorities have not been able to address effectively, once again for the
simple reason of lack of financial resources. With the expansion of the numbers
of universities, numbers of academic staff have also been increased with the
result that in their employment pyramid, our universities have a somewhat wider
base level, consisting of relatively young academics. Although the vast
majority of them need post-graduate qualifications, many of them find it
extremely difficult to obtain overseas scholarships. Unlike it was the case a
few decades ago, foreign scholarships do not easily come by now. Those who
complete their local Masters degrees at local universities, for the
confirmation in the post and to satisfy the minimum requirements for
promotions, need doctoral training abroad. The Ministry of Higher Education or
the UGC do not have a mechanism to send these teachers abroad on scholarship
for doctoral training. The limited facility that has been made available under
the National Center for Advanced Studies need to be improved and expanded
substantially to address the urgent needs of the academic human resource
development. Sri Lanka can learn from the example of the countries such as
Indonesia and South Korea which during their economic take off period sent
their young university academics to the best universities in America, Europe,
Australia and Japan on full government scholarships for post-graduate training.
Such a scheme does require new allocations to the Ministry of Higher Education
and the Universities.
One of the most neglected areas
of university development is the capacity building among the non-academic and
administrative staff. If our universities are to receive substantially high
levels of new funding, human resource development in the administrative and
managerial spheres should be a priority area of policy attention. Without
managerial skills development of the administrative staff, coupled with
attractive salary packages, the universities will continue to lag behind the
private sector in the domain of institutional management. Officials at various
levels, — registrars, deputy and assistant registrars, bursars, deputy bursars,
technical officers, the clerical and other support staff – require greater
professional training, other than the skills development in the art of being
subservient servants of the VCs and Registrars. Large numbers of unskilled
young men and women recruited on contract basis for clerical and office work
with no job security or in-service training can hardly constitute the back bone
of university administrative staff. The point then is simple. Without a strong
administrative and managerial cadre base at all levels, and their skills
development through training and re-training, any greater allocation of funds
to universities is not likely to make a change.
Student Welfare
Welfare is another area for
improvement in the university life of our country. This includes subsidized housing
and residential facilities, health insurance, subsidized transport, culture and
recreation facilities for students. The facilities available to students at
present are quite meagre. Welfare facilities available to teachers and
non-academic staff are no better. It is quite astounding that the University of
Colombo which claims an elite status, does not have a single bus to provide
transport, subsidized or not, to students, staff and teachers to travel to the
university, a facility available, for example, in Bangladesh. This is the case
with our other universities as well.
Although the IMF might object to
it, a substantial increase in the student bursaries is a long overdue need. The
mahapola scholarship offers each recipient only a miserly sum of Rs. 2, 500 a
month, which is hardly adequate for a student to pay for meals even for a weak,
despite minister Bandula Gunawardena’s economic theory of stone-age survival.
Increased student bursaries at all levels of education, from school to
undergraduate education, are a social need in Sri Lanka, because education
still functions as the most important means to upward social mobility for the
poor and the low-income families, who constitute the majority of the country’s
population. The reasoning here is that the economic cost of increased student
bursaries will pay in the long-run, economically as well as socially.
Text Books
The lack of text books in
Sinhalese and Tamil, and in English appropriate to Sri Lankan/South Asian
contexts, is a key drawback in higher education in Sri Lanka. Private
publishers are reluctant to print university level textbooks because of the
limited scope of the market and the high cost involved in translations and
writing. The programme to publish translations of textbooks in natural, social
and human sciences implemented by the Education Publications Department in the
1960s and 1970s for the benefit of A/L and university students is a model worth
revisiting now.
A systematic textbook translation
and writing programme, to be initiated on an urgent basis, would require skills
training in translating academic work, editing, and printing, as well writing
new text books in English, Tamil and Sinhalese. If university students are to
be oriented towards learning in English, writing textbooks in English by local
university teachers, rather than using texts books published in the US and
England, is the most appropriate option. Since there is a significant expansion
in the scope of courses offered in different faculties in our universities, a
separate unit for textbooks can even be established at the UGC with the participation
of universities. At present, our university students do not have the habit of
buying textbooks for two other reasons than the non-availability of books. The
non-inclusion in undergraduate curricula the requirement of consulting
textbooks as compulsory, which is an extension of the non-availability of text
books in vernacular languages and in accessible English, is one. The other is
the financial hardships most undergraduate students encounter. These problems
can also be overcome through two steps: revising undergraduate programmes that
makes buying text books a compulsory component of learning, and increasing
student bursaries in the form a book allowance.
Conclusion
The above are some thoughts for
how to make use of additional funding to improve the university education. The
requirements in the school and technical education sectors would be far greater
than these, requiring much more public funding. Now is the moment for
broadening the public discourse on state spending on education. Eventually, inputs
from society, particularly from stakeholder communities, will enrich the debate
and hopefully the government’s agenda for strengthening Sri Lanka’s education
sector as well.
