State funding of higher education and research

The unique strength of Sri Lanka’s public education system is that it has been free up to university level. When we look at the massive level of student debt in other countries, including in the West, we realise what a great boon free university education has been for our youth. With the current worrying trajectory, once the floodgates of privatisation are opened with formal recognition of private universities, higher education will become unaffordable for many and state universities will rapidly decline as lecturers are poached by private universities. However, the challenges for the state university system in Sri Lanka are manifold, ranging from staff shortages, infrastructure gaps and lack of support for research with public engagement. And at the heart of it is the long underfunding of education as a whole.

- BY AHILAN KADIRGAMAR

Over the last decade and a half, the allocation for education in Sri Lanka has ranged between 1.5% and 2% of GDP. Sri Lanka has the lowest allocation for education in South Asia. The Government, as stated in its manifesto, has promised to change the level of funding:

“The NPP’s education policy aims to provide quality education that fosters a developed, humanistic, and responsible society. To achieve these goals, we will increase public investment in the education sector, gradually raising the allocation to education as a percentage of the gross domestic product up to 6%.”

It is a tall order to increase the current abysmally low level of funding of 2% of GDP to eventually 6%. When it comes to the allocation for higher education in the Budget of 2026, it is currently only a meagre 0.44% of GDP. However, the business community sees this crisis of underfunded state universities as an opportunity to proliferate private universities. In this column, I focus on the possibilities of increasing the investment in higher education. In other words, I spell out what measures the Government could take to increase funding of higher education and research in universities by, say, another 1% of GDP.

Attack from business

The underfunding of university education, over the last decade, has come along with an attack by the business community, claiming that the universities are the cause of unemployment. The earlier Kuppi columns busted this myth of “unemployable graduates,” particularly when it was peddled by the Gotabaya Rajapaksa Government. We argued that the problem was, in fact, the lack of jobs in the economy, which is even more the case today with the economic crisis. Indeed, creating jobs is the responsibility of economic policymaking, not that of the higher education sector. But governments conveniently hide behind the discourse of “unemployable graduates” when they fail to achieve economic growth and increased employment.