This is a list of universities in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, university education is strictly controlled by the government. Therefore all the degree-granting universities and most degree-granting institutes in Sri Lanka are government-owned or -funded. However autonomous in theory, only a very few institutes are truly autonomous.
Most of the state universities depend on funds given by the University Grants Commission (UGC), as it is their primary and sometimes only source of funding. Therefore the UGC has a great influence over these universities and administer the undergraduate intake. There are 16 such universities. The UGC itself comes under the Ministry of Higher Education.
A few other institutes exists which are owned by the government but function interdependently: The most prominent of these is the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT), coming under the Ministry of Science & Technology.[1] The General Sir John Kotelawala Defence Academy was a similar institute but has since been classed as a State University.
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