Ronald Thwaites | On visioning higher education

The yearly angst about the funding of college and university education is happening again. Promising students on the verge of graduation with fee money owing, are unable to sit final exams. Thousands more, leaving high school next month, aspiring to higher education, lack the resources to do so.

These personal disappointments are matched with the national deficit of highly trained workers. So as to avoid remaining a low-wage, basic skills economy with high-chest consumer tastes, we need to swiftly triple the number of graduates certified to international standards.

And let's face reality, these outcomes are required first to fuel the prosperity which continues to elude most of us, but also to prepare many for overseas employment. After all, the lines at the foreign embassies are getting longer by the month as mostly younger and apparently better educated Jamaicans opt to live and work elsewhere. Other countries with less to offer than us have turned this trend into advantage and profit by intentionally training for export.

In an economy already dependent on remittances, should Jamaica not be doing this for our aspiring health, education and security professionals who are so much in demand in the metropoles?

Facing these problems and opportunities, the recent symposium hosted by the Ministry of Education to chart a policy on higher education and training was right on time. However, there exist several challenges to the effective expansion of this sector, which I do not think have been adequately addressed.

The first is the issue of access without wasteful duplication of institutions. In a small country where there will always be the need to ration resources and where quality teaching talent is scarce, it does not make sense to have multiple institutions offering the same courses. A sensitive level of rationalization cannot simply be left to the marketplace. As one example, the nation should purposely culture the University of the West Indies as our Harvard and the University of Technology as our Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Next is the matter of quality. Too many degree holders do not have an adequate command of standard English or appropriate levels of mathematics, science and information technology. Neither our standards of matriculation nor accreditation are high enough. Jamaican workers have to compete with the rest of the world. In our haste to certify, rigour in standards must be uncompromising.

Then there is the matter of humane studies for all. The very proper emphasis on STEM competences must not exclude the strong skein of liberal studies - history, citizenship, social responsibilities, ethics and literature, by which the massive attitude and behaviour crisis affecting most students can be addressed.

Finally for now, there is the question of who pays college and university costs. There must first be an acceptance that quality education is a most worthwhile investment of personal savings and should be saved for from the earliest stages of a person's life. Further, please realise that without counterproductive prejudice to other sectors of education, the State cannot assume much more of tertiary costs for the foreseeable future.

Need for scholarships

While I have no idea of what differential fees for the same course as recently announced could possibly mean, let us appreciate the need for scholarships and work-study opportunities to be available to all qualified students who genuinely cannot contribute.

The Jamaican people have already been saving for prudent purposes such as higher education. We have given financial institutions more than $800 billion to invest for their and our profit. More than that, we have saved up some $500 billion more in pension funds in the hope of longer-term return. So there is no shortage of available money, as the traders of cars fully understand.

So why should some of this money not be used to fund loans for the most prudential purpose of all - the investment with the best long-term prospect, which is the quality education, training and certification of the very kith and kin of those who have so prodigiously saved?

It will be a national scandal and a developmental catastrophe if the State should fail to resume earnest and rigorous negotiations with the broad financial sector to insist on products to fund higher education at single-digit interest rates spread over 30 years, with strict bonding and the use of technology and credit reporting to minimise absconders.

As in so many other areas of national life, it is not the money which is short. It is the appreciation of the principle of the common good, the adjustment of priorities and the absence of political will that is cramping us.

Who will lead the change?

- Ronald Thwaites is member of parliament for Kingston Central and opposition spokesman on education and training. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.