Chinese private universities are now offering more higher education placements for Sri Lankan students who have not been selected to local universities after passing the G.C.E Advanced Level examination, said South Asian Coordinator of Sino-Lanka Educations (Pvt) Ltd W.D Samantha Kaushalya who is in Sri Lanka on a mission to promote Medical and Engineering studies for local students in China.
He told the Business Times that Tianjin Medical University China will recruit 50 Sri Lankan students and 25 students for engineering faculties in China including the Shengyang Aerospace University. Currently 400 Sri Lankan students are studying Medicine at the Tianjin Medical University and the first batch of 94 students passed out recently.50 Sri Lankan students are studying engineering in Chinese Universities at present .
All these students found placements at these Universities, through Sino-Lanka Educations (Pvt) Ltd, which is affiliated to Tianjin Medical University China and Shengyang Aerospace University, he said. Apart from the huge, untapped market for wealthy parents willing to pay for quality, Chinese education is also an exportable commodity now, he added.
Over 230,000 international students studied in China in the year 2009, and 901 are from Sri Lanka with 165 enjoying Chinese government's scholarships. Sri Lanka's Sri Jayawardanapura University and the Tianjin Medical University China recently entered into a Sister University Friendship Programme which had set the stage for many interactions among the students of the two countries, he revealed. In addition Sino-Lanka Educations (Pvt) Ltd is maintaining a Sri Lankan restaurant at Tianjin Medical University China. This was the first time that Sri Lankans are allowed to operate a restaurant in that country he said.
During recent times, the number of scholarships provided by the Chinese Government to Sri Lankan students has also significantly increased. At present altogether 104 university students have received the opportunity to study in China. The Chinese Government also provides a series of training programmes for Sri Lankan government officials, scholars, journalists and entrepreneurs each year.
In rich, coastal China, parents pay $3,000 a year to educate their child in a reputable, residential school operated by private management. Families can afford to spend this kind of money -- the equivalent of a skilled factory worker's annual wage -- partly because of rising white-collar prosperity and partly because the one-child norm, implemented since 1979 to control population growth, has reduced the number of young dependents. Supply of quality, non-state education is still nowhere close to demand even though pretax profit margins are 50 percent or higher, Samantha said. |
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