Politicisation, indiscipline blamed for deterioration of Uni education

February 5, 2012, 8:58 pm , The Island.


by Dasun Edirisinghe

The quality of university education is fast deteriorating owing to politicization, indiscipline and lack of modern technologies and facilities, a recent survey reveals.

The increasing rate of graduate unemployment is a major burden and severe criticism has emerged against the traditional and non-updated university curricula, the survey titled Determinants of Unemployment among Sri Lankan University Graduates states.

The survey was carried out in 2010 by the Manpower Planning, Development and Research Division of the Department of Manpower and Employment (currently under the purview of Ministry of Productivity Promotion) in collaboration with the former Ministry of Labour Relations and Manpower and the University Grants Commission with financial assistance from the International Labour Organisation under the ‘Decent Work’ Country Programme.

More than 5000 graduates who passed out from six national universities during 2006 – 2009, were taken as the survey sample.

The report observes that non compatibility of university curricula has created a mismatch between the skills possessed by the graduates and skills demanded in the job market.

The quality of education imparted by the local universities has come down and this has resulted in furtherance of graduate unemployability, it notes.

The report has identified three main reasons for the depletion of the quality of university education, namely; politicization of the university system, indiscipline in the universities and lack of state-of-the-art technologies and facilities. The report suggests that a further scientific analysis providing reasonable estimations of the impacts of those determinants to the employability of graduates must be done.

In the study, a structured postal questionnaire was used for data collection and descriptive statistics and measurers of association were used for analysis. The key focus was to understand the levels of employment, unemployment and other economic activity of university graduates who have recently passed out and to identify the possible determinants of their career outcomes.