Shamala Kumar
This Article is formed from listening to university students from across the country for two research initiatives, one on academic freedom and another on higher education policy. In speaking with students, the fears they carry could not be ignored. Students navigate university education, with anxieties about their future and fears that they and their university education are inadequate, all while managing their families’ daily struggles. I explore students’ anxieties and the extent to which we, the public, and higher education policies must take responsibility for their experiences.
The Neoliberal University
For decades, universities have been transforming. Neoliberal policies, promoted by the World Bank, have reduced public education expenditure and weakened the State’s commitment to public institutions. These policies frame individuals as responsible for their success and failure, minimizing structural realities, such as poverty and precarity. They instrumentalise education, treat students as “products” for a “competitive’ job market while education markets feed on students’ insecurities. Students are made to feel lacking in “soft skills”, or skills seemingly necessary to navigate classed-corporate structures, and lacking in technical skills, or those needed to operate technologies used within the private sector.
Student activists and, sometimes teachers, have challenged this worldview, demanding State commitment to free education. Governments sometimes yield but also fear the consequences of student politics and have long waged campaigns to discredit student activism. It is within this context that students pursue education.
Portrayal of students
A Peradeniya student told me student-organized events must meet “high standards”, because of the negative public perceptions of university students. I understood what she meant; I had heard of our ‘ungrateful’, ‘wasteful’, ‘unemployable’, and ‘entitled’ students. The media and decades of government propaganda have reinforced these depictions.
About ten years ago, when government moves to privatize higher education were strong, a corporate executive complaining about traffic caused by “yet another useless protest” was unable to explain why they protested. News coverage, I realised, framed these protests as public inconveniences, rarely addressing students’ demands. A prominent advocate of neoliberal educational policy, reinforced this narrative, saying “state university students make up just ten percent of their cohorts”, gesturing dismissively as if to say their concerns were insignificant. Such language belittles student activists and youth, renders them voiceless and allows their concerns, such as classed worldviews, and access barriers to and privatization of education, to be easily dismissed.
It is in this environment that the conception of the useless university student, fighting for no reason, has developed. Students must carry this misrepresentation, irrespective of their own involvement in activism.
Not being good enough
Attacks on free higher education and the absence of meaningful reforms designed to address students’ problems, now weigh on students’ minds. Students question whether their education is relevant and current, pointing to outdated equipment, software, and curricula. University administrators acknowledge these constraints, which reflect Sri Lanka’s ranking as one of the lowest in the world for the public funding of education and higher education.
Rarely has the World Bank, so influential in driving educational policy, highlighted the public funding crisis and instead emphasizes technological deficiencies, the public sector’s “monopoly” of higher education and limited private sector involvement. It downplays the reality that few families can privately afford such funding arrangements.
Students are also bombarded with fee-levying programmes promising skills and access to jobs, preying on students’ insecurities. Many, while struggling make ends meet, enrol in off-campus pricy professional courses such as in accountancy, marketing or English.
The arts student
Some students worry their education is too theoretical and “Arts-focused.” A student from the University of Colombo described having to justify her decision to pursue an arts degree. The Public, she said, saw this as a waste of her time and the country’s resources. She courageously wore this identity, yet questioned if she was, in fact, unemployable as she was being led to believe.
She does not, however, draw on the fact that arts education has long been the “cheap” option that governments have offered when pressured to expand higher education. While arts education may need fewer laboratories and equipment, they require adequate investments on teachers, strong on content and pedagogy, to closely engage with individual students; aspects of arts education which have systematically been disregarded.
As access broadens, particularly in the arts, more students from marginalised backgrounds have entered universities; students who may feel alien in systems aligned with corporate interests. Thus, students quite different from the classed conception of the “employable graduate,” whose education has systematically been under-funded, graduate from arts programmes frustrated, diffident, and ill-suited for jobs to which they are expected to aspire.
The dysfunctional university
Students voice criticisms of their teachers, as myopic, unworldly, and unfair. Their perspective reflects the universities’ culture of hierarchy and its intolerance of difference, on the one hand, and the weak institutional structures on the other. They are symptoms of years of neglect and attempts by governments to delegitimize universities, to shed themselves of the burden of funding higher education through anti-public sector rhetoric.
Some students, marginalised for being anti-rag, women, or ethnic minorities, feel an added layer of burdens. Anti-rag students, or more often, students who do not submit to university hierarchies, whether enforced by students or staff, are ostracised, demeaned and sometimes subjected to violence. Students unable to speak the institution’s dominant language face inadequate institutional support. Women describe being ignored and silenced in student union activities and left out of student leadership positions.
Furthermore, quality assurance processes rarely prioritise academic freedom or students’ right to exist as they wish, except when they complement the process of creating a desirable graduate for the job market. These processes focus on moulding professionals and technicians, as one would form clay, disregarding students’ anxieties from being alienated from themselves by such efforts.
Problems at home
Beyond the campus, parents face debt, illness, and precarious work. Students are acutely aware of these struggles. Some describe parents collapsing from the strain and sometimes leaving them to carry the family’s difficulties. A student described feeling guilty for being at the University while his family struggled to survive. To ease the burden on their families, students earn incomes by providing tuition, delivering food, and carrying out microbusinesses.
Tied to their concerns over having to depend on their families, is their fear of being “unemployable”, a term that places the blame of unemployment on students’ skill deficiencies. Little in this discourse connects the lack of decent work and jobs for them and their parents to the weak economy and job markets into which successive batches of graduates must transition. Much of the available jobs in the country are those that require little in the form of education, and those too do little to provide a living wage. Students must, therefore, compete for a limited number and breadth of frankly not very desirable work. Yet, it is they who must feel the weight of unemployability.
Committing to students
Universities frequently fail to recognise students’ worries. Instead, we, coopt neoliberal discourses, telling students to become more marketable and competitive, do and learn more, be confident, improve English, learn to inhabit those classed spaces with ease; often without the support that should accompany these messages.
We expect these students, insecure and anxious, to think critically, and demonstrate curiosity and higher-order analyses. When they collapse under the pressure, universities respond by providing mental health services. While such services are needed, they risk individualising and pathologising systemic problems. They represent yet again the inherent flaws with solutions that emerge from neoliberal ideological positions that treat individuals as the source of all success and failure. Such perspectives are likely to reinforce students’ anxieties, rather than address them.
As Sri Lanka revisits education policy reforms, there is an opportunity to change our framings of education and to recognise these concerns of students as central to any policy. The state must renew its commitment to free education and move from the neoliberal logic that has guided successive reform efforts; we, as the public, must restore our hope and expectations from free education. Education across disciplines, the arts, as well as STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), must be strengthened. Students’ freedom to inhabit university spaces as they wish, must be respected and protected by institutions. Education policies must be tied to broader economic and labour reforms that ensure families can safely earn a living wage and graduates can access a rich range of decent meaningful work.
