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University Admissions in Ceylon: Their Economic and Social Background and Employment Expectations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

G. Uswatte-Aratchi
G. Uswatte-Aratchi
Affiliation:
The United Nations, New York
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Extract

In this paper I attempt to answer three main questions: the first, who has access to university education? the second, what are the changes in the spread of opportunities for university education between 1950 and 1967? and finally, what employment do university students expect to obtain? and briefly to examine the implications of the answers to these questions in the formulation of educational policy.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , May 1974 , pp. 289 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 See UN, Committee for Development Planning, Report of the Seventh Session (New York, 1971), pp. 33–4, for an indication of world concern regarding this problem;Google Scholar and Dudley Seers, The Meaning of Development (ADC Reprint, 1970), for an economist's attempt to take account of this change in emphasis.

2 Ministry of Planning and Employment, The Five-Year Plan (Colombo, 1971), pp. 1–5;Google ScholarPlanning Commission, The Fourth Five-Year Plan (New Delhi, 1970), p. iv;Google ScholarPlanning Commission, The Fourth Five-Year Plan, 1970/75 (Islamabad, 1970), p. 1.Google Scholar

3 UNESCO, Access to Higher Education in Europe (Paris, 1968), p. 18.Google Scholar

4 See Blaug, Mark et al. , The Causes of Graduate Unemployment in India (London, 1969);Google Scholar and ILO, Matching Employment Opportunities and Expectations: a Programme of Action for Ceylon (Geneva, 1971).Google Scholar

5 See Wriggins, W. Howard, Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton, 1960);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Farmer, B. H., Ceylon, a Divided Nation (Oxford, 1963).Google Scholar

6 That being the availability of some data in Strauss, Murray A., ‘Family Characteristics and Occupational Choice of University Entrants as Clues to the Social Structure of Ceylon’, University of Ceylon Review, Vol. IX, No. 2 (1951), pp. 125–35.Google Scholar

7 This project was proposed by the author to the National Council of Higher Education in 1966. The questionnaire was designed and administered by V. A. Gunasekera, then of the University of Ceylon and the Council. The returns were processed at the Department of Census and Statistics, Colombo, and under the supervision of V. A. Gunasekera.

8 ‘Sinhalese–Tamil relationships … have bedevilled politics in the island for the last five decades. There are often other conflicts in related fields—Sinhalese Buddhist opposition to the Roman Catholics (Sinhalese and Tamils)’, A. J. Wilson, ‘Sinhalese–Tamil Relationships and the Problem of National Integration’ (Ceylon Studies Seminar No. 1, The University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, 1969) (mimeographed).

9 These findings cast serious doubt on the validity of such common assertions as ‘most fathers decide to give their girls only a secondary education and stop their schooling after that or even earlier’. Jayewardena, B. S., ‘The Life of Ceylon Women’, in Barbara, W. Ward (ed.), Women in New Asia (Paris, UNESCO, 1963), p. 157.Google Scholar

10 OECD, The Development of Higher Education, 1950–1967 (Paris, 1970), p. 70.Google Scholar

11 Ministry of Education, Report of the Education Commission, 1964–66, (Delhi, 1966), p. 313.Google Scholar

12 The Development of Higher Education, 1950–1967, loc. citGoogle Scholar.

13 UNESCO, Access to Higher Education in Europe, p. 22Google Scholar.

14 Strauss, op. cit., p. 131.

15 Survey, 1967.

16 Jayasuriya, D. L. (‘Developments in University Education: the Growth of the University of Ceylon (1942–1965)’, University of Ceylon Review, Vol. XXIII (1965), p. 96Google Scholar), after observing differences in the average size of the families of a sample of students in 1963 and that among them, those in the faculty of medicine belonged to the smallest, suggests ‘that as in Western Countries, the upwardly mobile come from smaller families’. In the light of the phenomenon described here, his evidence cannot be used in support of his suggestion, which may perhaps be true. For his purposes he should have been looking for data that show whether among the particular social group, marked by an access to a knowledge of English, those families from which students were admitted to the universities were smaller than the others. His data only confirms that the well-to-do urban dwellers, most of whom knew English, had smaller families than others, since on the whole families from which students enter the faculty of medicine, as a social group, tend to be separate from families which send students to the faculties of the humanities and social studies, and comprise mutually exclusive social groups.

17 In Thailand, for example, nine out of the twelve institutions of higher education in the country are in Bangkok; ‘… there are at present glaring imbalances of educational development in different parts [of India]’. Report of the Education Commission, 1964–66, p. 108Google Scholar.

18 The reasons for this separation are many: first, the population in the tea and rubber plantations is almost wholly in self-contained communities, with their own markets, health and medical services and schools; they do not effectively form a part of the local government institutions; and, ethnically and culturally, they are somewhat large islands in a sea of Sinhalese.

19 The Central Bank of Ceylon, Survey on Cost of Production of Paddy (Colombo, 1969), pp. 17, 22.Google Scholar

20 Dissawe, P. B. Bulankulame and Senanayake, M. Senanayake in the Cabinets between 1947 and 1965Google Scholar.

21 The regulations require that a student shall not repeat the GCE (Advanced Level) examination more than once as a candidate from a school.

22 Richards, P. J., Employment and Unemployment in Ceylon (Paris, OECD, 1971), p. 58.Google Scholar

23 Department of Census and Statistics, Census of Population, Ceylon, 1963, Vol. I, Pt II (Colombo).Google Scholar

24 ‘In almost all countries of Europe, students from families engaged in intellectual work provide a large minority, and sometimes even the majority, of student members, although these families represent only a minority of the population.’ Access to Higher Education in Europe, p. 18. In India, in 1954, 68 per cent of all university graduates of that year came from families in which the principal family occupation was ‘government service, other service or business’. Blaug et al., op. cit., p. 131.

25 This association is not uncommon. For a clear picture of the situation in a developed economy in Western Europe, see Sauvy, Alfred and Girard, Alain, ‘Les diverses classes sociales devant l'enseignement’, Population, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 229–31.Google Scholar

26 In the UK between 1928–47 and 1961, there was little change in the proportion of students at university coming from working class backgrounds. See Higher Education, App. Two B, Cmnd. 2154 II–I (London, HMSO, 1963), p. 4.Google Scholar

27 Higher education in India ‘is mostly being availed of by the top 5 per cent of the population’. Report of the Education Commission, 1964–66, p. 112.Google Scholar

28 In 1950 it was observed ‘that the university is a government department designed to prepare the children of government employees for government service’. Strauss, op. cit., p. 134.

29 See also ILO, Matching Employment Opportunities… (Technical Papers), pp. 149–50.Google Scholar

30 Since 1970 and the institution of the administration under Mrs S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the government has begun to acquire substantial ownership in the means of production in other sectors.

31 For a somewhat similar statement of the problem in India, see Blaug et al., op. cit., p. 94.

32 See Ferez, Jean, ‘Regional Inequalities in Education Opportunity’, in Halsey, A. H. (ed.), Ability and Educational Opportunity (Paris, OECD, 1961), p. 77.Google Scholar

33 These are ‘families providing for their children an educative environment, including, in particular, supporting social and intellectual pressures in the same direction as those exerted by the school. For obvious reasons, such families are proportionately more numerous at the top of the social scale.’ Floud, in Halsey, op. cit., p. 102.

34 Administration Report of the Director of Education, Ceylon, for each year.

35 It should be clearly understood that these are not retention rates, for the calculation of which one needs data on the flow of each age cohort of students through the school cycle, which are not available.

36 A summary of the actual educational policies for the near future, expressed in general terms, would not far differ from this statement. See Ministry of Education, ‘Loan Request to the IBRD and IDA for Selected Projects in the Ceylon Educational System, 1971’ (mimeographed, Colombo).

37 Ministry of Education, Loan Request…, Annexe 111/16.

38 Ibid., Annexe 111/18.

39 Space in a classroom for a student at the second level in general education is estimated at 10 square feet. In each of the laboratories for physics, chemistry and biology, there will need to be 25 square feet per student, for students taking up those subjects. See Ministry of Education, Loan request…, p. 202.

40 This is, of course, not to imply that the answers to questions of this nature are unique or even feasible. Yet, such questions help to bring out the probable consequences of policy decisions, which on grounds other than those covered here, are wholly desirable.

41 See, for example, Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs, Report of the Planning Committee on Education, Health, Housing and Manpower, 1967 (Colombo, 1967).Google Scholar

42 For some suggestions, see Matching Employment Opportunities…, pp. 141–5.