Ahilan Kadirgamar
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.
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.
In this context, why do businesses push the same narrative about graduates from state universities? I argue it is for three reasons.
First, the business lobby wants to privatise education, which is in its class interest, so that higher education becomes the privilege of the wealthy. They reject the value of free education, crucial for reducing social inequality.
Second, there is a section of the business community that seeks to commercialise education to change it into a profit-making business. They are more interested in creating fee levying Sri Lankan universities to educate wealthy students from abroad rather than ensuring education for our underprivileged students.
Third, it is because the business community in Sri Lanka, unlike in some other countries, hardly invests in its employees, and expects universities to supply graduates moulded for its corporate interests, as if students are subsidised inputs for their production. In Japan, for example, companies historically invested in training the graduates they employed and gave them long-term employment. Sri Lankan businesses, on the other hand, expect the universities to train their future employees, and then hire and fire them without any investment and commitment.
Finding the funds
One may still ask where Sri Lanka will find the funds to invest in free higher education. I propose three funding models for higher education drawing from other regions, without necessarily endorsing their education systems.
First, there should be a special business levy dedicated to tax revenues that will be transferred to higher education. For example, Nigeria provides a funding model; to address the long decline of education, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund was established in 1998 as an act of Parliament. It levies a two-percent tax on the profits of all companies registered in Nigeria. The mandate of the Fund is to support the physical infrastructure essential for teaching and learning; instructional material and equipment; research and publications; academic staff training and development; and any other need critical for the improvement and maintenance of standards in higher educational institutions. Funds are allocated in a ratio of 2:1:1 to universities, polytechnics, and the college of education.
Second, we can draw from the tremendous strength of the higher education system in the Nordic countries, which fund higher education through progressive taxation. In Sri Lanka, we have been debating the need for a wealth tax, and it is high time such an annual wealth tax, including on property, luxury vehicles on the road, etc., are levied, with a portion of it allocated for the free higher education system.
Third, while the Government considers how to ramp up and levy such taxes amidst the ongoing economic crisis, there is an immediate option for the Government to show its commitment to free higher education: it can allocate land and idle state assets to public higher education institutions. We can draw from the history of the land-grant universities in the United States, established through the Morrill Acts in the mid and late nineteenth century, which allocated federal lands for states to fund public universities, both through returns and sale of such lands. In fact, the later Morrill Act of 1890 helped establish universities and colleges for African Americans. We can draw from that legacy to address the higher education needs of our Malayaha community, which was excluded from free education for decades after Independence.
Research and development
Rebuilding our state university system can also support our national development through investment in research. The NPP Manifesto gives considerable attention to investment in research and development:
“Sri Lanka allocates only the limited amount of 0.12% of its annual GDP for research and development, while countries with similar geo-political characteristics such as Malaysia allocates 1%, with Thailand 1.2% and Vietnam 0.42%. Meanwhile South Korea allocates 4.6%, Japan 3.6%, USA 3.5%, and China 3%, becoming developed countries. Even the limited research conducted in Sri Lanka have not been used properly for economic and social development.”
This acknowledgement should come with higher investment in the state universities in particular, if research is to contribute to national priorities of economic and social development. It is research from public universities, if set on the correct path including with time allocated for lecturers overburdened with teaching, that can support national development. Research and development today for the most part is supported by external donors with neoliberal motives and private actors merely concerned about profit.
The consequences of the lack of public engagement in and vigilance about economic policymaking have been devastating. Research in Sri Lanka did not question the neoliberal policies of successive governments. And there is silence to this day about the comprador outlook of the Central Bank with its failed management of our foreign reserves leading to default on external debt, and for that matter the betrayals of national interest in relation to debt reduction and the cuts to our working people’s retirement funds with the bondholder-centric debt restructuring agreements. In this context, strengthening our state universities and investing in their research should be a priority now more than ever. The broader commitment towards public funding of higher education and engagement with the citizenry’s concerns through research are necessary not only to chart a path out of the current crisis but also to avoid future crises.
