Editorial | UTech’s return to core

One reader of the online version of this newspaper conflates The Gleaner’s suggestion that the University of Technology (UTech) return to its core as an elite engineering and technology school as a bid to “dumb down” the institution.

The reader, who signs as Moses, seems to equate erudition with the social sciences – an area into which UTech has delved in recent years – and would probably urge the university to introduce courses in the humanities, and, perhaps, transform itself into a liberal arts school.

By Moses’ reckoning, the UTech, in focusing on what it was designed to do, would somehow undermine its ability to “contribute to (the) national discourse on matters like constitutional reform because it is perceived to be outside their scope of expertise”.

We are, of course, ignorant to the logic by which reader Moses arrived at that position. But not only is the conclusion patently wrong, it misses the essence of the argument for UTech to reposition itself: which is its potential to drive Jamaica’s economic growth and development.

Unfortunately, robust data is not available on Jamaica’s labour market, which would help to inform how the island can transition from more than four decades of low growth, stagnant labour productivity, and economic activity that rests primarily on low wages and little value added.

TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN

Some things are known, however: that the global economy is increasingly technology driven, and countries that fail to keep up will fall further behind. Jamaica, in that regard, is already a laggard. The island’s poor educational outcomes, especially in the area of STEM, drag on economic development.

For instance, Jamaican companies in the business process outsourcing sector, which operate relatively low on the global industry’s food chain, find it difficult to recruit suitable staff. Industry leaders warn that the growth of artificial intelligence technologies could, over the next five years, put in jeopardy perhaps 70 per cent of the sector’s estimated 60,000 jobs.

Some of the industry’s bosses have raised the possibility of importing staff to do higher-level jobs.

Jamaica, however, does not have to rely only on the domestic data for a clear picture of job trends in the global economy. Recently, Britain’s Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, an NGO that tracks the industry, complained that infrastructure projects were being threatened by a shortage of engineers and technicians. It was not only among traditional engineers that the problem existed. It was worse among multidisciplinary sectors, “especially in fields of renewable technologies”.

Additionally, the United States Department of Labor has estimated that globally, 40 million technical jobs are unfilled. That figure will rise to more than 85 million by 2030. Many of those jobs are in clean and renewable energy. In America, too, 1.2 million engineering jobs will open by 2026.

In the digital realm, software developers are in short supply. Demand for this category of technology worker is expected to grow by more than 20 per cent by 2030. It has also been projected that in a decade, over 70 per cent of new jobs in the US will require some form of technical skill.

The in-demand jobs are not low-paying.

MEDIAN SALARY

In 2021, the median salary of nurse practitioners was US$120,680, and was projected to increase by 45.7 per cent over the next decade.

For software developers, the median income was US$109,020, with a projected rise of 25 per cent over 10 years. And while the median wage of an American web developer was US$31,990, or 29 per below that of the software specialist, it was expected to rise more than five per cent faster than that of the software specialist over the next decade.

Obviously, these are not the salaries that will exist in Jamaica in the near to medium term. But the statistics are useful on two fronts: they underline the direction of the global economy and the sectors in which Jamaica will be pressed to compete; secondly, they alert young people, including those who might enrol at the UTech, to career possibilities.

In this context, the UTech’s role is not, as reader Moses suggests is The Gleaner’s intent, only to graduate hands-on ‘techys’ in the fashion of a lower-level technical and vocational training institution – although producing competent technical professionals must be part of its mandate - but like the world’s leading technical universities, a substantial part of its job is to be a leader in transformation. That means being at the forefront of applied research and innovation. Or as William Barton Rogers, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, framed it, UTech’s graduates should not only be capable of putting together gadgets but have full grasp of the “scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them”.

We believe that the UTech’s new leadership, specifically Chancellor Lloyd Carney, gets it. He understands the folly as a specialist, elite technology institution pretending at being a liberal arts college.

The private sector has a stake in the UTech’s success – and new direction. Firms must, therefore, support the university with endowments, scholarships, and R&D partnerships, making it easier for the university to return to its core.