State Universities – A lottery only where there are more losers than winners

You enter a State University after 2 years of wasting your time before you do an iota of academic work, by which time your study ethic has disappeared and you are ripe to be exploited by an ideology that is completely outdated, namely the IUSF (JVP affiliated Student Unions that tend to dominate the system)

You struggle for a wasteful 4 year period, and earn a degree, at a University that does not prepare you to make you aware of what is available in the outside world, and you are effectively thrown on the scrap heap!

This is a severe shock to the system as your family tell you that you are so fortunate as one of only 1% of the best of the best in Sri Lanka to have entered university and obtained a degree, and you wonder why no one is giving you a job. Unfortunately the facts of life have NOT been taught at University, and no one like me will be allowed into the University system to tell you the facts of life either!

The IUSF students are busy agitating to ban private education. Why? Simply because, it is only those graduating from the private sector who appear to be getting the jobs, leaving only public sector jobs for the state graduates.

Then how do you get a public sector job? Yes, now with the increased income of state sector employees, the illusory benefit of a Public Sector job is even greater. I personally know many private sector employees are clamoring for the same public sector job, as they cannot handle the pressure of performance, of piece work, and productivity, being told that they have none of that in the public sector and don’t even have to come to work on time, as they don’t have a fingerprint scanner to sign on and can leave by 3.30pm to go home.

This compounded problem, means that offices of politicians are flooded with people wanting to be placed in jobs. Letters from Ministers and MPs and recommendations, saying they have been stalwarts of the party through thick and thin are dime a dozen clogging the arteries of government, everywhere you look. It is the manna from heaven, the “State Sector Job for Life with a Pension” that everyone is striving for!”

This is the third in a series of continuous blog entries that lead me to write this as a culmination of the trilogy. This same person who I met in the first entry is still sitting in the office waiting now for 5 hours, to meet the Minister, hoping that by meeting him, there will be some difference, and that he will get the job! There is NO way he will get what he wants, and his hopes will only be further shattered. I asked him over the weekend to send me his CV by email, and he did not even have the courtesy to reply to my sms, as I wanted to send his CV to some contacts in the private sector to see if I can help. So obviously he did not want a Private Sector job or even be considered for one, as some member of this family or his colleagues would have convinced him that, the NLDB is the surest way to achieve his goals, whatever they maybe and he should pursue the dream no matter what!

     It is time we wean our babies in Universities from their mother’s milk and teach            them a thing or two about the big wide world out there, that to succeed needs                courage and risk!