Recently I went to watch a movie at the cinema, before the movie started there were a few ads, and one of them was for some institute. Everything looked good, but at the end of it they showed over 50 universities.

Where is the focus ? Is every course the same ? So I could just do the degree there and say which university I want the degree from ? Is that how it goes ? I remember people talking of deals where I could get my degree for 1000USD just pay and get it, is this something like that ? I hope not.

It got me to wonder, some time ago a friend of mine was studying at can’t remember it’s name, I think it was, it was a US based I think. He did a few years there, wasn’t that great as it seemed, and later they gave him the option to go and study at one of their affiliate universities in the US. It turned out to be some 2 bit, crap university, well he said it couldn’t be even called a university, or institute or even a school !

Today I noticed in the papers the president had called for control over bogus BOI degrees. Taken from the Daily Mirror

“No more bogus BOI degrees
Amidst reports of mushroom higher education institutions giving questionable degrees, President Chandrika Kumaratunga has ordered that academic institutions must not be given permission to operate as BOI projects without approval from the Education Ministry or the University Grants Commission.”

Well this is good in a way, I was myself getting confused on what to go with, there are so many institutes out there these days, some eve run from a home. Well I guess there is always room for quick money.

How are we figure out what is a good institute, university, and so on ?

I would go with look at the long standing institutes, look at their track record of graduates, are they working, unemployed ? If they are employed are they employed at top jobs are they doing the work of those who do a basic diploma. There are some new ones which are supposed to be good but haven’t still met anyone from them. Check it they are they affiliated with a good university ? Are you looking at a future of working abroad? Do they offer programs where you can work study part of the degree abroad or you can do the full degree in Sri Lanka ? If work placement an option ? I heard from some friends of mine, that was a useful thing, as when you finish usually the place you had your work placement at, takes you back, that i most times. Do they have a decent studying environment ? Are the lecturers, well educated ? We don’t want people teaching us who are less educated than we are, again another friend of mine told me he was doing an MBA at some institute and later found out one of his lecturers didn’t even have a degree was just memorising and repeating, I hope this is not happening everywhere.

Those days when I went for anything I would compare the price and generally go for the cheaper option. One example not too relevant but hear it out, I wanted to buy a hi fi set up, I went all over the place, checked out a bunch of brands, listened to them, there were many good ones. Then I finalised it to 2 options. One a good a brand, but a bit more expensive and another unbranded one but sounded excellent and it was so much cheaper. What did I do went for the cheaper one, it was great at first, but later on problems started arising, this was not after 1 year or 3 years, after 3 months. I went back to the shop, and I could get nothing done, warranty also didn’t cover the problem I was stuck and I regretted not going for the good brand.

This happens here in education as well, some of these institutes get the best marketers, we get fooled, we join, and what do we find out 3 months down the line it’s a load of crap, but we can leave but loose a bit of our savings.

We could wait it out for 3 years but what do we find out next, we can’t get jobs. A friend of mine was telling me about this institute I think somewhere close to Malabe or in Malabe. They are an IT institute they take large amounts of students at very good prices but I heard more than 50% of them don’t have jobs are in jobs which a basic diploma would have given them.

Maybe like what the president is doing, someone could introduce like they have abroad a ranking system or something of that sort to help us better select our future.

Don’t get me wrong, not all institutes are bad, there are wonderful institutes which give us opportunities from Australia, UK and US.

Milton