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© Proceedings of the Ruhuna Quality Assurance Sessions 2021 (RUQAS 2021)
st
21 September 2021

Message from the Director, Quality Assurance Council (QAC), UGC

As a nation, we have achieved significant progress in our basic education indicators compared to many
other countries, particularly in the South-Asian region. The very reason is that education is recognized

as a fundamental right by the Constitution of Sri Lanka, ensuring the right to access to education.

Education can aid to equip the young with necessary social, cultural, and civic competencies.
Importantly, higher education and its knowledge contribution are intricately linked with economic

growth of a country. In examining the contribution of higher education expansion to economic growth,
“mismatch” between demand and supply, “diversity” of higher education and employment

opportunities, rise in graduate unemployment, a growing trend of “key qualifications”, and

globalization of the graduate labour markets are common issues in many countries.

Expansion of higher education towards professions that are in demand and increasing opportunities for
young people to benefit from an expansion constitutes an important role of the government.

Unfortunately, Sri Lanka is placed relatively low in the relationship between knowledge contribution
to development of the economy. Sri Lanka is in a great need to develop its intellectual human capital

to compete in a knowledge-intensive global economy. It is particularly important that Sri Lanka

recognizes the importance of science, technology, and innovation to propel Sri Lanka towards
realizing its full economic potential.

Quality Assurance in higher education is a concept borrowed from the manufacturing industry, that is

meant to mitigate the negative effects that can accompany the massification of Higher Education that

is inevitably required to support the economic growth and development of any country. Quality
Assurance serves three main purposes that are improvement: to maintain and improve the performance

quality of higher education institutions, accountability: to provide accountability to society for the use
of public funds and compliance and control: to ensure that higher education institutions do what

governments want them to do.

The concept of Quality Assurance was introduced to our state university system about two decades
ago. Quality Assurance of all state universities by QAC of UGC is facilitating the transformation of its

higher education system to meet the demands of the future and thereby render an immense service to

the people of this country. The Standing Committee on Quality Assurance of UGC was established in
December 2004 and QA Council of the UGC was established in September 2005. Now, each of the 17

universities under the UGC has a well-established central body led by a Director for Quality

Assurance, who works together with cells in each faculty or institute to promote and support Quality
Assurance activities.

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