Over the last several weeks I have spoken about the impact of education in tertiary level education, with particular reference to the new courses I administered way back in the nineties. Sadly that was the last period of innovation in higher education, for in the last quarter of a century, while much money, kindly or perhaps not so kindly given us by the World Bank, has been expended in upgrading the quality of University Education, hardly anything substantial has been achieved.
That is why the projects continue, all with the same aims, though with increasingly grand sobriquets, beginning with the inadvertently appropriate IRQUE, Improving the Quality and Relevance of University Education, irksome but not very productive.
Those who set up that project engaged with a will in fulfilling one of the principal aims of such projects, which is to send the money back to donor countries. So in order to improve English, students were forced to sit American or English examinations, enormously expensive, with our own University Test of English Language, UTEL, being comprehensively ignored. But of course no one asked the UGC committee on English, as to what was being done, and what more could be done with our own resources, before prescribing remittance to other countries of what our people would have to repay.
Indonesian blueprint
Another stroke of genius was getting us to follow an Indonesian blueprint, also developed through Bank funding, which ignored the fact that that was to enable private Indonesian universities to attract more students, whereas in Sri Lanka universities had applications galore, and what we needed to do was ensure that those who were admitted got a decent education. But ignoring all that, we were asked to work on the basis of what were termed ‘skripsi’ (transcripts in English, which of course we did not have in Sri Lanka – the consultants had not bothered to translate this). One, an American who was more open than the rest, told me that the main purpose of such consultancies in the minds of those hired was to generate another consultancy.
Incidentally, one component of that project was a labour market observatory, but no one in the system had any record of that in later years. IRQUE was followed by HETC (Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century) which naturally included a component to promote the relevance and quality of teaching and learning. The great achievement of that project it seems from the World Bank website was that ‘Between 2011 and 2015, 76,000 undergraduates benefitted from English language skills training’. No mention was made of the fact that this had been happening for the previous five decades, and that employers still complained that English skills were insufficient, which they still do.
Unfortunately there has been no concerted attempt to check on which universities provide decent English language skills, or rather as to which faculties in which universities do well, and which fail miserably. Nor was there any effort, under IRQUE, to make English not only compulsory for a degree, but with credit commensurate as to other subjects offered. At Sabaragamuwa we did this, which is doubtless why our employment record is so good.
Equally sadly, there has been no effort to improve English before students enter universities, as was done through the GELT course, which produced good results. But attendance at that could not be enforced, whereas it should be possible to insist that all students admitted to university sit an English test beforehand, for which coaching is offered free of charge in each division in the country.
Inexpensive solution
That could be done at minimal cost, using local teachers selected as GELT teachers had been selected. But no, that is too simple and inexpensive a solution, and so we returned to the grindstone with yet another project, AHEAD (Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development), worth Rs $100 million. That is now drawing to a close, but amongst its achievements is a massive amount spent on building, with vast sums being advanced to contractors who have benefited from the interest. What has actually been constructed seems worth very little, in some places at any rate, but the remedy for so much money is not to inquire into what went wrong, but rather to develop yet another project, to spend more borrowed money.
I described the first absurdities in my book English and Education: In search of Equity and Excellence? which Godage published in 2015, but that was about early years and did not look at the way the absurdity was compounded by more projects. In looking at those early days I mentioned one stunning example of the ignorance of those who agreed to such loans, for one senior member of the UGC claimed, when I objected to his prescribing extremely expensive material from abroad, that that did not matter for the payment came from a grant. I had to tell him that it was from a loan, at which his mouth opened wide, whether in astonishment or shame I could not tell.
This underlies the main reason for such waste, namely that unless there is a financial spur, what is seen as free money, most people are unwilling to take initiatives. But as I have shown, it is perfectly easy to improve relevance and quality through our own efforts, though that needs good leadership and sympathetic understanding of students.
I looked previously at how we managed at Jayewardenepura, through systematic attention to language, to bring students with little English at school to levels at which they functioned effectively in English. One student there has become an expert in translation studies, another is a leading light in the administrative service.
Best English journalists
The latter had turned initially to journalism, though as I noted he abandoned that swiftly. However, at Sabaragamuwa, having started a course in journalism, albeit as a minor subject, on the imaginative lines devised by Prof Somasundara, we produced two of the best English language journalists now working in this country. And these were students who had not done Advanced Level English, and who had very low levels of English when they came to university.
But I have no space here to describe how we devised the course, to give them not only an excellent command of the language, but also to develop the wider awareness and the analytical skills that have held them in such good stead in their illustrious careers. That description must then be held over for another article.
Professor Rajiva Wijesinha