Editorial | Training for home, too

The latest trek by Jamaican teachers from the classroom, mostly for jobs abroad, has reignited the episodic debate about training people specifically for jobs abroad – an idea that has the support of Prime Minister Andrew Holness.

“I believe it is now time that we take a more deliberate and planned approach to the training and labour for our local market, and for countries who require our trained labour,” Mr Holness said in a speech last week. Which suggests that his administration will be formulating policies for application in circumstances when they arise.

This newspaper believes it is an approach worthy of consideration if, indeed, it lessens turmoil in the labour market, and in key sectors, as is happening now with the last-minute departure of scores of skilled teachers, in critical disciplines, to be replaced by mostly inexperienced teacher college graduates.

However, policymakers should be alert to the fact that any such programme is, at best, a short-term solution, unless Jamaica addresses the two fundamental issues that drive the circular problem of labour migration: a stagnating economy and a crisis in education outcomes. The problem of violent crime, including murder, is an outgrowth of those two.

It would be helpful, also, if Jamaicans – including Asburn Pinnock, the principal of The Mico University College, who proposes training teachers for export – are reminded that the matter of the best educated citizens emigrating to developed economies is not new. Perhaps a better way to look at it is by educating Jamaicans to function globally, while fixing the problems that drive so many abroad.

Indeed, a 2006 paper by an International Monetary Fund (IMF) economist, Prachi Mishra, calculated that in the Caribbean, a region with strikingly high emigration, Jamaica was second only to Guyana in losing its most educated people – those with at least 12 years of education.

BETTER PAY

In the 35 years between 1965 and 2000, the paper found, 85 per cent of Jamaica’s labour force, people educated to the tertiary level, had emigrated to OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, the same ratio as Grenada, and four percentage points shy of Guyana. Seventy-eight per cent of the emigrants went to the United States.

Over the same period, 29 per cent of the labour force with education only to the secondary level made it to the USA. A mere five per cent with only a primary education do so. The outflow of people within secondary and primary OECD countries over the review period was 35 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively.

It could not be immediately ascertained if there are updated versions of this data, and the benefits therefrom, which show, in part, the US$2.3 billion annually that Jamaica receives in remittances, the second-largest inflow of foreign exchange after tourism. But even with this level of compensating remittances (over 15 per cent of GDP), it is difficult for any country to drive economic growth and ensure social stability with brain drain of the magnitude identified in the IMF working paper.

People leave, as teachers have been noting, mostly because they get much better pay, and therefore are able to enjoy more comfortable lives abroad. The lack of economic well-being in Jamaica is exacerbated by anxieties over crime, given Jamaica’s homicide rate hovering at 50 per 100,000.

But the ability of the Government to pay teachers, nurses and other public-sector employees more is constrained by an economy whose growth averaged one per cent annually for four decades, and in which labour productivity declined at a similar rate over the same period.

On the face of it, the suggestion by Mico’s Dr Pinnock that institutions like his own work with overseas recruiters to train the professionals they need makes sense. The appropriate protocols should be developed for such schemes.

But Jamaica must enter any such arrangement with its eyes wide open, cognisant of the issues that are likely to arise and of gaps to be filled. Among the matters to be dealt with is having graduates who meet the matriculation requirements for tertiary-level education. For instance, in this year’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams, only 69.9 per cent of the Jamaicans who did the test passed English, and 37 per cent passed mathematics, both of which are core subjects in the education matrix.

LARGELY ILLITERATE

A deeper disaggregation of this year’s data is not yet available. Historically, however, not much higher than 40 per cent of the nearly 50,000 Jamaica students who do the CSEC exams pass five subjects at a single sitting, in which those subjects include maths or English. When those five subjects include maths and English, a combination considered the floor requirement for matriculating to tertiary education, the single-sitting pass ratio declines to under 30 per cent.

The crisis begins before then. Up to a third of students end their primary education, at age 12, largely illiterate. Nearly six in 10 cannot identify information in simple English sentences. That is a crisis that demands urgent action.

On the other hand, the available long-term data suggest that Jamaica is already training at the higher level for the overseas labour market. So, Dr Pinnock and the principals of nurse training institutions perceive the issue of providing surpluses to go abroad.

In the absence of agreements with other countries, these principals, having met their domestic student quotients, might, without requiring additional government subsidies, attempt to meet the needs of students whose sights are set on overseas jobs, by charging them the economic cost of their training. Thereafter, these students can take their own chances on the foreign job markets.

Of course, the training/education institutions and workplaces will find that training is not an end in itself. Foreign recruiters, especially of Jamaica’s teachers and nurses, tend to prefer experienced, mid-career professionals, rather than entry-level staff. Our labour market and establishments have to plan for this, too.