Sri Lanka University Intake: How Many Students Get Selected

This tool is a transcription, not a model. Sri Lanka University Statistics 2024, the latest edition the University Grants Commission has published, carries four admissions grids in its Chapter 2, and every figure on this page is a cell of one of them:

• Table 02-03 gives admissions by district: 137course rows against the 25 districts, a “Special & Additional Intakes” column and a total. This is where the national intake, your district's count and the all-district table come from.
• Table 02-04 gives the same districts split into Merit and Other, where the UGC's footnote defines “Other” as students admitted under the district quota and the underprivileged-district quota. This is the merit-versus-quota panel.
• Table 02-02 gives intake per university for each programme group, the 20 universities, campuses and institutes in the Universities tab.
• Table 02-01 gives, per A/L subject stream and for four admission years, how many candidates qualified, how many were selected, and the selection percentage. That is the A/L odds tab.

The three computed figures

Almost nothing here is calculated, and the three things that are, are labelled on the page:

1. share = district intake ÷ national intake, Medicine, Kandy: 145 ÷ 2,109 = 6.88%
2. merit share = merit ÷ (merit + quota), Medicine, Kandy: 69 ÷ (69 + 76) = 47.6%
3. rank = the district's position when all 25 counts are sorted descending

Selection percentages are not recomputed. Table 02-01 prints its own percentage column, so the published figure is what the page shows and the code asserts that selected ÷ qualified reproduces it.

Why the merit split is sometimes broader than your course

The district grid is published course by course; the merit split and the per-university intake are published for 16faculty-level programme groups. The UGC publishes no key between the two, and the groupings really do differ, Table 02-04 puts 417 Engineering places in Colombo, while Table 02-03's Engineering row shows 376, because the group also absorbs Engineering (TM) and Engineering (EM).

So each course-to-group link states its own basis. For 11groups the mapped courses reconcile against the published split district by district, which proves the membership. For others a UGC footnote names the course, or the group carries the course's own name. A handful are our reading of the course name, and the page says so. Where no basis holds, the tool asks you to pick the group rather than guessing: 81 of 137 courses are linked, covering 38,398 of the 44,881 admissions.

How the transcription is checked

The district headers in the PDF are printed rotated, and a plain text extraction emits them in an order that is not the column order, which is how Kandy's intake ends up reported as Matale's. The column order here was taken from the header x-positions, and 9 families of assertions, 929 in total, re-derive published figures from the transcribed cells every time the page renders: every course row against its printed total, every district column against the printed total row, every group against its printed merit and quota totals, and the 44,881 grand total by three independent routes, courses, quotas and universities.

The 16programme groups the UGC publishes the admission-policy split for, largest first. “Quota” is the UGC's “Other” column: district quota plus underprivileged-district quota, including special and additional intakes.

Source: UGC Table 02-04, admissions by academic programme and admission policy, 2023/2024. Merit % is computed from the two published columns.

• UGC: Sri Lanka University Statistics 2024, Chapter 2: University Admission

  Every per-course, per-district, per-university and per-stream figure in this module is a cell of Tables 02-01 to 02-04 of this chapter.

• UGC: Sri Lanka University Statistics 2024 (reports index)

  The landing page that publishes the chapter PDFs. stat_2025 and stat_2026 return 404, so the 2024 edition is the latest published.

• UGC: Admission to undergraduate courses: selection criteria

  The statutory 40% all-island merit / 55% district / 5% educationally-disadvantaged framework the Merit and Other columns implement.

• UGC: University admissions

Transcribed and cross-checked against the UGC PDFs on 2026-10-03. The 25district columns keep the publication's own order and its own spellings. The page is reviewed when the UGC publishes its next statistics edition, as of 2026-10-03 the 2025 and 2026 chapter files do not exist, so 2023/2024 remains the newest admissions year on record.