A legal degree the medical council would not register: SAITM, the private college Sri Lanka abolished by Act of Parliament

Not every ruined medical education involves a fraudster. Sri Lanka's SAITM case involved a licensed institution, a court that ruled in the students' favour, and a government that abolished the college anyway — and the students were the ones left holding the consequences.

The South Asian Institute of Technology and Medicine (SAITM) was established in Malabe in 2008 by Dr Neville Fernando to offer medicine to students who missed the narrow state-university quota. It was initially affiliated with foreign institutions, applied for degree-awarding status in 2011, and received it from the University Grants Commission in 2013 over the objections of the Inter-University Students' Federation and the Government Medical Officers' Association. When its first graduates emerged, the Sri Lanka Medical Council refused, from 2016, to register them, holding that the programme did not qualify them to intern in hospitals. The Court of Appeal ruled in January 2017 that the SLMC must grant provisional registration; the Supreme Court upheld that in September 2018, ruling that registration must be granted "without any condition". By then it did not matter. After months of street protests by state medical students and doctors, and a fast unto death by parents of state students, the government decided on 8 November 2017 to abolish SAITM and stop new enrolments. In 2018 Parliament passed a special provisions Act transferring SAITM's medical students to the General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University. The UK's General Medical Council lists SAITM as the only Sri Lankan medical programme whose graduates are ineligible for licensure.

There was no scam here in the criminal sense, and that is the point. Families paid high private fees for a degree that was lawful, chartered and — as the courts eventually held — registrable, and still spent years unable to intern, subject to a political fight they had no part in, before being folded into a different university by legislation. The Peninsula and Global Voices reported the protests as a dispute over the principle of private medical education; for the students it was six years of uncertainty about whether they were doctors.

The lesson generalises. "Recognised by the government" and "degree-awarding status" describe the institution's permission to teach. The medical council's willingness to register graduates is a separate decision, made by a separate body, that can be withheld, litigated and politically reversed. Before paying for any private or foreign medical programme, obtain — from the regulator, not the school — a written statement that graduates of that programme are currently being registered, and understand that where a programme is contested at home, the students become the argument.