Sri Lanka, Dec. 6 -- It is high time that Sri Lanka started debating whether the tertiary education must be charged and should the private sector be allowed to get engaged more actively in this sector, through facilitating investments for meaningful reforms in higher education, in order to produce the skills needed for high-paying jobs in a growing economy, a senior economic opined.

Dr. Dushni Weerakoon, Executive Director at the Institute of Policy Studies, an independent think tank in Colombo, called for reforms amid other things needed to strengthen Sri Lanka's factor endowment, a term used in economic parlance to identify the amount of resources such as labour, land, money and entrepreneurship available for a country to be utilised i...