Improve quality in undergraduate education

A speech
delivered by Prof. Wiswa Warnapala, Minister of
Higher Education at a special seminar on
Improving Relevance and Quality of
Undergraduate Education (IRQUE) organised by the World Bank at
the BMICH on September 5.
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A brief discussion of the historical evolution of the University,
particularly in respect of developments within the Faculties of Arts and
Humanities, is necessary to examine the problems of the Arts graduates
who have become pawns in the hands of some politicians and the magnitude
of the problem, many facets of which have resulted in the creation of
several problems relating to both social and political stability. It is
in this light that all aspects pertaining to undergraduate education in
the universities need to be analysed as its quality impinges on all
processes of development in the country.
The over emphasis on undergraduate education, specially in such areas
as Arts embracing both Social Sciences and Humanities, was entirely due
to two important factors; one, for instance, focused on the need to
convert the University into a centre of cultural renaissance, and those
members of the educated elite, through the famous ‘University movement’
advocated the establishment of a University ‘adapted to local needs’.
The English educated professional men, who were members of the Ceylon
University Association, demanded that knowledge imparted by a new
University should be ‘relevant and adequate’. Sir Ponnambalam
Arunachalam, who gave vocal expression to these ideals, stated that ‘the
creation of a University meant national existence, and without sitting
idly to arrest the process of de-nationalisation, the Ceylonese will
have to make up, as they owed a duty to themselves and to posterity’.
This statement, in fact, showed that the nationalists of the period
always thought in terms of a University capable of contributing to a
renewal of indigenous Sinhalese culture. In other words, they wanted a
University which can embody the traditional Sinhalese culture. Yet
another view, as expounded by Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, was that ‘the
projected University should dedicate itself to the development of
Oriental Languages. Therefore, the University, after the acrimonious ‘
battle of the sites’, was to be conceived as an institution which would
revitalise and promote indigenous culture, and this position came to be
adopted as a reaction to the role of the University College (1921)
which, in the twenty years of its existence, functioned more in the
nature of an institution promoting Western culture.
Academic Year Total
1999-2000
G.C.E. A/L 1998 3,647
2000-2001
G.C.E. A/L 1999 3,539
2001-2002
G.C.E. A/L 2000 3,794
2002-2003
G.C.E. A/L 2002 3,880
2004-2005
G.C.E. A/L 2004 4,113
2005-2006
G.C.E. A/L 2005 4,502
2006-2007
G.C.E. A/L 2006 4,987
2007-2008
G.C.E. A/L 2007 5,030 |
Its curricula-oriented towards London University examinations,
resulted in the retardation of the indigenous languages and culture. Sir
Ponnambalam Arunachalam, being a powerful and articulate member of the
then intellectual elite of the period, advocated a University that is
capable of bringing about a fusion of both Western culture and Oriental
culture. It was the view of Arunachalam that care needs to be taken to
see that the youth of the country do not grow up as strangers to their
past history, mother tongue and traditions.
This was one aspect of the background in which Social Sciences and
Humanities were encouraged in the initial phase of University education
in Sri Lanka. Yet another significant reason was the character of the
colonial university which, again, in the initial phase, was expected to
produce personnel for administrative and commercial establishments. The
metropolitan country wanted to create an administrative elite loyal to
the colonial regime and the Colonial University was asked to produce men
who could man the administrative services with both devotion and
efficiency.
The purpose in adverting your attention to the above historical
reasons was largely to emphasise the fact that a number of historical
factors influenced the establishment of Arts Faculties in the initial
phase, and the country, undoubtedly, benefited from it as the early
intellectual enterprise of the country came to be built around an
exclusive galaxy of intellectuals in the field of Oriental Languages and
Culture. In 1942 the University of Ceylon was built around four major
faculties - Arts, Oriental Languages, Science and Medicine, and it was
the first two faculties - Arts and Oriental Studies which, through their
products and scholars, began to dominate the intellectual and cultural
life of the country in the subsequent three decades.
These four Faculties had 17 Departments, and the Departments relevant
to our discussion included such Departments as Indo-Aryan, Tamil,
English, Western Classics, History, Geography, Economics and Philosophy.
In 1943 three separate Departments were created out of Indo-Aryan-Sinhala,
Pali and Sanskrit. A Department of Arabic was created in 1945 and the
Faculty of Oriental Studies was expanded to include courses in Buddhist
Philosophy and Buddhist Civilisation.
Sociology, which functioned as a unit in the Department of Economics,
was made a separate Department in 1949. A separate Department of
Education was established in 1949; a Department of Archaeology too came
into existence in the same year. It was in this form that both the
Social Sciences and Humanities began to dominate the intellectual life
of the universities and this kind of expansion came to be emulated by
the new universities as well.
The two universities - Jayewardenepura and Kelaniya, came to be
founded on two ancient seats of learning, and the relevant historical
antecedents had a tremendous impact on their evolution, and they, as
expected, began to emulate the experience of the University of Ceylon in
establishing Departments of Study in both Social Sciences and
Humanities. Historical tradition of the two institutions influenced them
to go in the same direction. These two Universities, due to the nature
of their involvement with Oriental Languages and Culture, made use of
this strong foundation and began to establish Departments specializing
in Oriental Languages and Culture. It is in this context that the Arts
Faculties began to expand, and the large majority of students came to
the University to study Social Sciences and Humanities.
Year Number Number
sat admitted
1953 1065 248
1954 996 294
1955 1072 284
1956 1110 344
1957 1187 380 |
This was primarily due to the paucity of facilities in the rural
areas in the science field, and most of the students were compelled to
offer subjects in the Arts stream. Needham Commission (1959), taking
into consideration the criticisms of the nationalist opinion in the
country, argued for further extension of facilities for the study of
Arts and Humanities. The Needham Commission, arguing in support of the
extension of Arts courses, stated that ‘it is also the duty of a
university to be the repository of the larger cultural heritage of all
mankind and to transmit the spirit of that culture to succeeding
generations’.
The impact of the political change of 1956 perhaps influenced the
Commission to make this kind of comment, and its recommendations had an
impact on the expansion of the Arts courses in the Universities. It was
in the seventies that an attempt was made by the Osmund Jayaratne
Committee on Higher Education to recommend a scheme of rationalisation,
the aim of which was to rationalise the existing courses of study in the
Arts and Humanities with a view to creating centres of excellence in
respective subjects. This scheme of rationalisation was viewed as a
Marxist conspiracy, and it created lot of resentment among the academic
community.
The Osmund Jayaratne Committee, stating that what the country needed
now were not Government officials but economists, scientists and
technicians, emphasized that ‘the liberal arts tradition was continued
and fostered in our schools, and only in recent times was any serious
effort made to change the emphasis towards the scientific and technical
field’. With free education the schools system expanded fast but the old
traditions remained. In the absence of proper facilities for science
education, our schools continued to produce an ever-increasing number of
students trained in the arts and humanities’. The emphasis on liberal
arts degrees in the universities, a tradition which the country
inherited from colonial times, resulted in a situation highly weighted
in favour of the production of Arts graduates, and the number of
undergraduates, in all four universities in 1970, following
Arts-oriented courses as a percentage of the total undergraduate
population was as follows:
It was on the basis of such statistics that the view was expressed
that there was an imbalance between the pattern of courses provided and
the priorities of national development.
The increase in student enrolment for Arts-based courses for all
Universities was nearly twenty-fold, and the intake in 1942 was 396,
which, by 1979, reached up to 6952. Management studies, which became a
separate discipline in 1972 - now there are Management Departments in
all Universities-enroled only 921 students. By 1979, it almost doubled
to 1806, for all Universities. In the annual intake, the Arts intake
remained high, and this, again, was due to the continued emphasis on the
courses in the Faculties of Arts in the Universities. In 2006, out of a
student community of 60,350, 19,795 came within the category of Arts;
another 11,093 and 3617 fell within the category of Management and
Commerce respectively. It would be useful to quote the relevant
statistics relating to the annual intake of Arts students in the last
ten years.
In the fifties, the Arts intake was as follows:
Now it would appear that the heaviest pressure was on the Faculty of
Arts, and the demand for university education on the Arts stream
presented a number of difficulties. The demand for University education
in Arts remained high because of the fact the external examinations of
the University of London were not open to Sri Lankan students. It was
known that more than half the undergraduate population was in these
subject areas, and it was this trend which called for a number of
reforms with a view to enhancing both quality and relevance. In the past
several decades, specially after the youth revolt of 1971, there was
this criticism that the universities have failed to produce graduates
who could effectively contribute to economic and social development of
the country.
Academic Percentage
Year
1966-1967 77%
1967-1968 76%
1968-1969 73%
1969-1970 70% |
Major criticism was that the universities, especially those programs
of study in the Arts faculties, have failed to produce an employable
graduate, and such criticisms were made primarily in the context of the
deteriorating quality of the undergraduate. There was a visible decline
in the quality of the graduates who came via this mill at the
universities, and several reasons could be attributed to this decline in
quality. What was required to arrest this trend was a realistic package
of policies to restore an intellectual culture through which both
quality and relevance could be enhanced.
The Government of Sri Lanka, with the generous assistance from the
World Bank, launched the program to improve Relevance and Quality of
Undergraduate Education (IRQUE) for which a Policy Planning and
Development Unit was set up in the Ministry of Higher Education. The
value of this project was 51.0 million Us Dollars. This was to enhance
the quality and relevance of undergraduate education programs which,
from the inception of university education, dominated the academic life
of the universities in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, the majority of the
university programs conducted in the seventeen universities cater to
undergraduates who, though produced in large numbers, do not possess the
required skills for the labour market.
This came to be linked to the question of unemployment and
under-employment of graduates; for instance, in 1968 there were 10,000
unemployed graduates and the great majority of the unemployed were those
who had an Arts degree. In 1990, the number graduated stood at 25,000,
out of which 11,707-almost 47 percent-remained unemployed, and the
reason was that they could not find employment appropriate to their
educational achievements.
No much change was made to link the courses of study to the demands
of the labour market, and the over-reliance on the traditional
disciplines created a fresh set of problems. Major problem was the lack
of quality and relevance of the existing degree programs in the
universities and this project, with the funding from the World Bank, is
expected to address this issue of enhancing the quality and relevance;
the IRQUE Project has focused on certain initiatives to improve
undergraduate education with a view to arresting the decline in the
standards of undergraduate education; the most significant need is to
restore a learning culture in the universities and it is with this that
the quality could be enhanced. In my view, quality of the undergraduate
has declined primarily as a result of the absence of a learning culture
or an intellectual environment in the universities, and this is
integrally associated with the failure of the universities to work
according to the University Calendar. This, again, is linked to
political activism of a segment of the student community, some of whom
are bent on destructive violent behaviour.
The IRQUE project, proposes to enhance the quality of undergraduate
education on the basis of capacity building, quality assurance and
accreditation, higher education management systems, performance targets,
Quality Enhancement Fund, and Skills Development programs involving IT
and English. It is hoped that through a series of initiatives related to
such key aspects that an employable graduate could be produced through
the network of Sri Lankan Universities. Innovations and changes focusing
on the needs to enhance the quality and relevance of undergraduate
education are certain to make an impact on the Universities engaged in
undergraduate education, and they are sure to focus their attention on
the need to respond to economic and social situations of a given
country.
In my view, equal emphasis is necessary to improve the post-graduate
sector which, if properly organised, is certain to make a major impact
on the undergraduate learning culture. It is on the basis of this
relationship that quality and relevance could be enhanced in
undergraduate education. Therefore, Arts Faculties of universities,
which, in the initial phase of University education, played a
significant role in the intellectual life of the country, need to be
infused with new ideas so that their undergraduate education could be
made relevant to the immediate developments. The IRQUE Project, though
it bases its improvement program on both performance and needs, should
give equal weightage to matters that lead to student unrest in the
universities, and this, as I always emphasise, is integral to the
decline in quality.
Yet another important issue is the nature of the Administrative
staff, whose input is equally important, and recruitment policies in
respect of this segment needs immediate revision as the universities
need competent teachers as well as competent and committed
administrators who too could assist in the enhancement of the quality of
undergraduate education. In other words, I do not want the policy-makers
to treat student unrest and their militant political activism as an
extraneous factors; it is a factor integrally linked to certain basic
issues in the University.
One is likely to say that the welfare issues matter here. It is not
only through the enhancement of the quality of undergraduate education
that the graduates of the Arts Faculties could be fruitfully used for
development in the country. The learning environment, in which both
teaching and research are required to play a fundamental role, needs to
be restored in order to convert the universities into effective and
useful centres of learning.
In conclusion, one can say that this project, through which funds are
to be provided to the Arts Faculties in the universities to make the
necessary adjustments to make them useful players in the development
process in the country, is certain to elevate the status of the
Faculties of Arts as active partners in the intellectual life of the
country.
A speech delivered by Prof. Wiswa Warnapala,
Minister of Higher Education at a special seminar on Improving Relevance
and Quality of Undergraduate Education (IRQUE) organised by the World
Bank at the BMICH on September 5.
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