Educate them to stay!
Published:Sunday | April 17, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Keisha Hill, Gleaner Writer
The Government should be cautious about spending too much money on education while not creating jobs for citizens.
That is according to Claudette Crooks, president of Money Masters Limited.
"I am not fighting education at all. What will happen is that you are going to have a set of persons who are well-skilled and looking for jobs, but there are no jobs. You have to look at how you apportion the money among the various ministries, bearing in mind your short-, medium-, and long-term objectives," Crooks said at last Friday's Gleaner Editor's Forum.
The Ministry of Education gets $70 billion for housekeeping expenses, and $3.2 billion for capital spending in the 2011-2012 Budget. The recurrent budget for the education ministry reflects a $1 billion reduction when compared with last year, but that is made up on the capital side, where the increase is just over $1 billion. The increase represents 13 per cent of the total $544.7 billion to be shelled out this year.
According to Crooks, the Government has to ensure that when it spends that amount of money, the country is getting maximum value out of every dollar that is being spent. She said there must be a system in which the Government can be assured that following graduation, especially at the tertiary level, the students will stay in the country.
"I don't have a problem in training and educating our fellow citizens, but we have to look at it in the context of building a wholistic system. We can't deal with one side and don't deal with the other side. If, for example, we are spending $10 billion dollars a year on UWI students, when we spend that $10 billion, how many of those students will take a flight and go outside?" Crooks asked.
The subvention allocated to the University of the West Indies (UWI) is to be reduced by more than $500 million, while the University of Technology (UTech) is set to get $39 million more from the Government. The UWI last year received $6.77 billion after the Government revised its Budget. The institution was scheduled to receive $6.18 billion. The proposed allocation is the same as that approved by Parliament in the last fiscal year before it was later revised.
Largest allocation
The UTech is budgeted to get $1.72 billion. If approved by Parliament, the allocation would represent the largest allocation to the institution since the 2009-2010 fiscal year, when it got $1.8 billion. The institution was given $1.68 billion last year.
"We have to train our citizens, but we also have to create jobs for them. We have to lay the policy guidelines, and it cannot be from a year-to-year budget. We cannot run a country from a year-to-year budget. There are certain objectives that we have, and there are certain mechanisms to implement those particular objectives, and whichever party is inside, they need to ensure that those are held and kept," Crooks said.
Crooks is also advocating that the education ministry change its approach to free education as there are some people who can afford to send their children to high school, but yet the Budget has to absorb the costs associated with their education.
"There are some parents that may be spending $70,000 per term for their child to attend prep school. When that child finishes prep school, that child goes into a high-school system where there is no cost involved. When you look at the allocation for primary and secondary education, a lot of that goes to salary. Why don't you have a system where the people who can afford to pay, pay at least something, rather than just have everything on the Budget?" Crooks said.
Minister of Education Andrew Holness said, when free education at the secondary level was reintroduced in 2007, that the objective of the Government's free-tuition initiative was to ensure that all Jamaicans had access to education.
The Government has set aside $22.7 billion in this year's Budget for secondary education, while $21.4 billion has been allocated for primary education, $2.2 billion for early childhood, and $10.4 billion for tertiary education. Last year, the Government spent $22.1 billion on secondary education $22.1 billion on primary education, and the same figure as this year for early childhood education. The figure spent for tertiary education last year was $10.4 billion.