Polarization of Education Towards the Rich and Privileged: A Case Study from the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka

Abstract

The stiff competition for limited but all free higher education opportunities in the state university system, especially in high-demand courses and programs such as Medicine, Engineering, and Science has been in existence for half a century. This stiff competition has fueled a tuition culture that has engulfed the entire education system to a point where it is extremely rare to find a student who has entered university without participating in tuition classes. The tuition industry which is significant in size but at the same time unregulated keeps charging exuberant fees from a student and in some cases up to Rs: 100,000.00 per subject per month for these in-demand courses/subjects thus effectively stopping the poor from accessing tuition classes. Accordingly, the current study tries to understand whether students coming from rich families/ background are more prone to getting selected for high-demand courses like medicine and Engineering. The study was based on the secondary data collected from the completed A/L examinations in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Hence, the data are free from the impacts of Covid-19 and the current economic crisis. The secondary data consisted of 12,277 observations. The results reveal that there is a significant polarization of education to high income category of the society. Results show that students enrolled in Medicine and Engineering degrees belong to higher income cohorts compared to the students in Humanities and/ or Management degree programs. The results find that there is a significant difference (Rs. 634,197) between the average annual family income of a parent of a medical (Rs. 905,548) and humanities (Rs. 271,351) undergraduate during last three years of 2019-2022. While alarmed by the findings we recommend more studies to be conducted covering more universities and to make policy decisions accordingly to slow down the polarization which negates the fundamental meaning of free education.