The young ladies who flood the Departments of Agriculture

If you go into any agricultural faculty in Sri Lanka, both the teaching staff and students have a female majority. This is good if you see women in all sorts of farming in Sri Lanka, but I have yet to see that fact reflected in the actual workforce.

What does that mean? Are we educating these people at enormous expense for them to try and get government jobs as village agricultural coordinators of advisers? I have a woman attached to my place in Polonnaruwa, who I do not know if she has got an Agricultural Degree, but is unable to communicate with the farmers of the area on an equal or knowledgeable basis where we can accept what she has to say, based on both theoretical and technical knowledge.

Is it that we have to blame the men in this area and say they have an equal chance of getting into the University so don't complain that it is the women who do so. One needs to have a certain Z score for university entry, and by and large there is a much greater proportion of females who do so and with this system of informing them what fields of study they have got marks for, if Agriculture is on the menu, then why not take it as the women want a degree, without much thought as to what subject or what field they wish to pursue in the future.

The young boys fall by the wayside and do not get into university and look for some easy way out of life, by joining the forces or the police or whatever they can get after a vocational course. I also often wander if those who go to the agricultural faculty have no intention of farming as they believe that profession is beneath them, but that they believe advisers are a cut above that and so aspire for the limited openings in this field. The additional tragedy is that these agricultural graduates use their degree to gain a marriage and then use the system for personal goals, rather than enter into agriculture proper as a lifelong vocation, which should be the aim of the courses.

It is time that all the Universities do a survey of the alumni and come up with some answers as to how useful these faculties are of producing knowledge based farmers to increase the productive output of the country rather than swell the ranks of the unemployed or unemployable.