Talk:Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka/Revision01

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University Admissions

(A paragraph will appear here explaining the excellent English-medium and science instruction in the schools available to Jaffna Tamils...)

At the time of independence in 1948, university admissions were based on solely on an applicant's performance on qualifying examinations administered in English. Sri Lanka Tamil applicants (and especially Jaffna Tamils) possessed an advantage relative to Sinhalese applicants, thanks to Jaffna's superior English-medium education facilities, as did Burghers, whose native language is English. Tamils (Sri Lanka Tamils and Indian Tamils combined) obtained 31 percent of available 1948 admissions even though they constituted only 20 percent of the population. Burghers obtained 4.1 percent of the admissions, even though they comprised only 0.7 percent of the population. At the same time, Sinhalese applicants won 61.5 percent of the admissions; the remainder were obtained by Moors, Malays, and others. At that time, most of the country's ruling elite -- politicans, professionals, business people, and bureaucrats -- spoke English and were to varying degrees out of touch with the vastly larger non-English-speaking population, Sinhalese and Tamil alike. It is very important to remember this fact because, as will be seen, changes in university admissions policies engineered by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP, 1956-1960) and United Front (1970-1977) governments were aimed as much at English speakers as they were at speakers of Tamil.

In 1956, an overwhelming Sinhalese majority elected the SLFP, which declared Sinhala to be the sole official language of government affairs. Designed to give an advantage to Sinhala speakers who had felt excluded from full participation in the country's affairs, the policy also addressed the Sinhalese perception that requiring English for highly valued government jobs gave Tamils an unfair advantage. Later modified to an "indigenous-languages-only" policy (Sinhala and Tamil), the SLFP's actions removed the advantage formerly possessed by English-speaking Tamils, and it also affected university admissions. By 1960, Sinhalese admissions had increased to 74.3 percent, a figure that was slightly larger than the proportion of Sinhalese in the population (72 percent).

Sinhalese gains came at the expense of the English-speaking Burgher minority, who won only 0.8 percent of the available places, and especially Sri Lanka Tamils, whose percentage of available admissions declined from 31.7 percent in 1958 to 16.2 percent in 1963.^[1] However, the percentage of Tamil students in the science, engineering, and medicine faculties, in which English-medium instruction continued, was little affected.^[2] For example, in 1969 Tamil students obtained nearly 40 percent of the available Science Group admissions overall, including 66.7 percent of the admissions in veterinary medicine.^[3]

What was widely perceived to be an over-representation of Tamils in pre-professional curricula was becoming increasingly sensitive due to the growing irrelevance of arts degrees to employment. The burgeoning number of Sinhalese arts graduates found themselves unemployed; meanwhile, Tamil graduates were well on their way to prestigious, lucrative careers. Sinhalese politicans and editorial writers openly speculated that the Tamil examiners were marking Tamil entrance examinations more favorably in order to give Tamil applicants an unfair advantage; in consequence, growing numbers of Sinhalese came to believe that the existing merit-based system was unfair and actually discriminated against Sinhalese applicants.

After its victory in the 1970 election, the United Front government was placed under immediate pressure to do something about the perceived over-representation of Tamils in pre-professional curricula, and a rumor spread that Tamils had won 60 percent of engineering admissions. The government implemented a set of policies that served, in effect, to set a lower qualifying mark for Sinhalese applications, but these policies failed to achieve what many Sri Lankans in both communities assumed was its underlying goal: To reduce the perceived Tamil over-representation in the sciences to a politically acceptable level. For example, in 1969-70, prior to the implementation of these policies, 30,445 students took the A-level admission examinations; they were competing for 3,129 places (792 in the sciences and 2,227 in liberal arts). Tamils won 315 (40 percent) of the 792 science places. In the following year, the percentage of Tamil admissions in the sciences had declined less than five percent. In 1973, the United Front's Minister of Education, Badi-ud-din Mahmud (a Sri Lanka Moor), committed the government to a fundamental change in policy: "Cut-off scores on competitive examinations were reduced to a uniform scale so that the number of students qualifying in each language became proportionate to the number sitting the examination in that medium" ^[4]. This policy was designed to placate Sinhalese suspicions that Tamil examiners were marking Tamil entrance examinations more favorably and to reduce Tamil admissions overall.^[5] The effect of the new policy was reduce the percentage of Tamil science admissions to 29.5 percent, a figure sufficient to alarm and radicalize Tamil youth but insufficient to placate Sinhalese hard-liners. In 1974, the government introduced a district quota scheme that achieved the desired dramatic reduction of Tamil science admissions while, at the same time, protecting and rewarding the interests of Mahmoud, the only Tamil-speaking minister in the United Front government: for example, the percentage of Sri Lanka Tamils admitted into engineering courses fell to 16.3 percent, while the percentage of Sri Lanka Moors nearly triped.

References

1. ^ Gunawardena, Chandra (1979). "Ethnic Representation, Regional Imbalance and University Admissions in Sri Lanka." Comparative Education, Vol. 15, No. 3, Special Number (4): Disparities and Alternatives in Education. (Oct., 1979), pp. 301-312.
2. ^ de Silva, C.R. (1978). "The Politics of University Admissions: A review of some aspects of the admissions policy in Sri Lanka 1971-1978." Sri Lanka Journal of Social Sciences 1(2)(Dec.): 85-123