In Sri Lanka, local education scarcity and a lack of opportunity created an opening for foreign institutions
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he also serves as the university’s adviser on civil discourse.
What I found in Sri Lanka itself, again and again, was a demanding combination of the familiar and strange, the encouraging and depressing. These binaries even covered my visiting the University of Colombo, the oldest and largest of Sri Lanka’s 17 public universities. With origins dating to a 19th-century medical school, founded while the country was a British colony, the country’s flagship university came into formal being in 1921.
Playing dumb, working-writer style, I asked my driver, a quiet and friendly man in his early 30s, who was with me for the entire trip, why there were so many advertisements for studying overseas. Unsurprisingly, he pointed to the lack of local employment opportunities, and he joked that Sri Lanka no longer belonged to Sri Lanka: now it belonged to China.
I mentioned my driver’s observations and plans to my first cousin and her husband when we met for dinner one night in Colombo. Educated, working professionals and confident anglophones who occupy a very different socioeconomic position in Sri Lankan life than my driver and his TOEFL-taking wife, they’ve sent their own daughters overseas, to universities in California and Melbourne.
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