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This commentary ran in the Chronicle
of Higher Education, "Colombo Diary", on December 18, 1998.
COLLEGE DEGREES BEAR BITTER FRUIT IN SRI LANKA
By Asoka Bandarage
Nadika Shirani is a tea picker, W. Iranganie
a mask maker, and Sudeepa Rathnakumara a stone cutter, all struggling
to survive in a remote district in Sri Lanka. However, they are
no ordinary village youths: All three are humanities graduates of
Sri Lankan universities. Products of the country's free educational
system, they are among the 35,000 or so unemployed university graduates
throughout the island.
Such unemployment is not a new phenomenon in Sri Lanka. Even in
the early 1970s, when I was a student at the University of Sri Lanka,
liberal-arts graduates, most of whom were from poor, rural backgrounds,
faced this problem. When I talked with university faculty members,
students, and graduates during a recent trip back to Sri Lanka,
I learned that job prospects for liberal-arts students have worsened
over the past twenty years, affecting the Sinhalese majority as
well as the Tamil and other minority groups. Unrest from the continuing
civil war has not helped matters.
The state-sponsored university system has expanded during the past
decade, leading more students to enroll. But the worsening problem
of graduate unemployment is not entirely attributable to that. Faculty
members in the sociology department at the University of Colombo
informed me that only about 12 per cent of all eligible students
enroll in Sri Lanka's universities.
During the 1960s and 1970s, many liberal-arts graduates educated
in Sinhala, the language of the majority, found white-collar jobs
with the Sri Lankan government. But privatization and economic liberalization
since 1977 have curtailed state enterprises and thus employment
in the state sector. The expanding private sector, especially foreign
banks and other companies, prefers to hire English-speaking youths
from the wealthy urban classes.
Jobs in the sciences and in technical and commercial fields also
are often closed to rural youth, who, besides having few opportunities
to learn English, face inadequate science and computer facilities
in their high schools and colleges. Graduating with liberal-arts
degrees, and without the family connections that wealthier urban
students enjoy, rural students are increasingly left out of the
economy.
The marginalization of these students reflects the broader problem
of growing social inequality, caused in part by global economic
changes that have increased the wealth of the upper classes while
lowering the poorest citizens' share of the national wealth. In
fact, as a result of changes associated with economic liberalization,
the poorest 10 per cent of the people have seen their share of the
national income decline from 1.4 per cent to 0.4 per cent.
Frustration, anger, and despair about social inequalities and blocked
opportunities are greatest among the educated unemployed. Rural
youth such as Shirani, Iranganie, and Rathnakumara, along with their
families, feel utterly betrayed after making great sacrifices to
get a university education. They ask why they need a degree to pick
tea, make masks, or cut stone. They wonder if they could have done
better without the piece of paper.
Many unemployed graduates also blame the university for robbing
them of their youth. The universities in the south of Sri Lanka
were closed for three years, beginning in 1989, because of political
violence. The resulting backlog of would-be students means that
high-school graduates must wait a number of years to attend classes
after they gain university admission. This has increased the average
age of students at the universities from early 20s to mid-20s, making
them older when they try to get jobs, as well as when they marry
and have children.
Despite these changes, students are still expected to follow traditional
norms regarding sexuality and family life. To be marriageable, men
are supposed to be fully employed, but many university graduates
are not able to fulfill that requirement. Prolonged unemployment,
underemployment, and postponement of marriage by men have created
a dearth of partners for women in corresponding age groups. In addition
to the frustrations created by bleak prospects for their own employment,
women graduates, as they grow older, must contend with Sri Lankan
taboos against premarital sex and the requirement that they be virgins
at marriage.
Unemployment, poverty, and loss of personal relationships may explain
the high rates of suicide among young people in Sri Lanka, which
has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world. Moreover,
economic and social frustrations stemming from blocked educational
opportunities and unemployment have contributed to violent extremist
political movements among youth, such as the Sinhalese Janata Vimukthi
Peramuna (J.V.P., or People's Liberation Front) in the south and
the Tamils' separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.)
in the north.
The competition for higher education and white-collar employment
in Sri Lanka is commonly depicted in international academic and
media discourses as an ethnic issue. Under British rule (which lasted
until 1948), ethnic minorities, especially Sri Lankan Tamils, had
access to university education, professional jobs, and administrative
work in the state sector far beyond their proportion in the general
population. Post independence governments, claiming to redress the
wrongs done to the majority Sinhalese population, introduced language
and university admissions policies favorable to rural Sinhalese
youth. Although these policies—which precipitated the Tamil
struggle against the Sinhalese-dominated government—have now
been abandoned, the civil war continues, causing much suffering
and destruction, and siphoning resources from education and social
development.
What is overlooked in analyses based on ethnicity, however, is the
common social-class concerns of both Sinhalese and Tamil youth.
Both the Marxist J.V.P. and the ethno-nationalist L.T.T.E. draw
their members from among rural youth frustrated with, and alienated
from, successive governments in the capital, Colombo. Both groups
want equal opportunities for education, employment, political participation,
and cultural survival. But, rather than address the rural youths'
legitimate grievances, the urban elite and the politicians tend
to treat them with fear and distrust. That response further alienates
the disadvantaged youth and exacerbates the cycle of violence and
militarism.
How can the nation's youth be used to improve Sri Lankan society,
rather than work to destroy it? Much can be done to engage the creative
talents of the educated unemployed. Most successful Sinhalese and
Tamil expatriates -- doctors, professors, and engineers, for example
-- are products of Sri Lanka's free educational system. Instead
of sending money home to support the civil war, they should redirect
their funds to programs to prepare unemployed graduates for the
urgent tasks of environmental protection, rehabilitation of refugees
and armed groups into civilian life, and provision of social services
for troubled families, the mentally ill, and other groups in dire
need. Funds are also needed to upgrade the public universities technologically
and to introduce more interdisciplinary curricula.
As one young unemployed woman with an honors degree in sociology
from the University of Peradeniya reminded me, if people on all
sides spent their money on social development rather than on the
war, the university graduates' unemployment problem would be resolved
overnight. Besides, there would be a future for all children in
Sri Lanka.
Asoka Bandarage is an associate professor of women's studies at
Mount Holyoke College and the author of Women, Population and
Global Crisis: A Political-Economic Analysis (Zed Books, 1997)
and Colonialism in Sri Lanka (Mouton, 1983).
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