Tertiary education must be financed

UWI Principal Dr Bhoe Tewari wants the financing problems of the universities addressed and urged regional governments not to bury their heads in the sand. World Bank figures, he said, suggest that 60% of the regional workforce has not completed high school. In his view,  the level of education of the workforce will affect the level of sophistication of technology in the work place. “So the Caribbean region must expand access to higher education and the 15% target set by Caricom some years ago, although it will not be met by the target date (2005), needs to be revised upwards,” he said.

“But how to pay for it? That is the challenge which some governments will face. And how to finance expanded capacity? That is the challenge, which all institutions will face including UWI. Both the TT and B’dos governments, he said,  must continue to fund not just tuition fees for students and  capital projects but ensure that resources keep up with growing demand and that quality is sustained and improved in existing institutions even while additional institutional capacity is created. “But what will Jamaica do? What will the OECS countries do? These are hard questions to answer not merely because of finance gaps and economic realities but because of the WTO and the rules which have been established to govern trade in educational services and the challenge that governments of the region face of expanding access to education opportunity without the means to make it possible for all who wish to do so,” he wrote.

Saying that the problem is already here, Tewarie said  the question is, “How are we going to find the money not just for the delivery of education but for research and for construction of a knowledge infrastructure across the region?  This is a question that we cannot avoid and must not ignore.” In an editorial that appeared in UWI’s publication, Stan, he noted that for  sometime now the Government of Barbados has been footing the bill for higher education for its citizens and pointed to Jamaica where students faced  increasing fees and no subsidies. He said, “Jamaica’s economic and financial situation makes it extremely difficult for that country to offer concessions to its citizens to pursue higher education ambitions.” At the current time the region, through Caricom, is engaged in establishing the CSME, which is an attempt to establish the deepest integraton ever in the Caribbean with genuine prospects for widening.

“If the CSME is established it will be a most comprehensive integration of economic and geographical space involving trade, investment and skills,” he said. However, he said except in the area of energy, where Trinidad and Tobago is doing well, Caribbean exports to the rest of the world has been declining. And, he added with Caricom itself, intra-regional trade is equal to only 10% of Caricom’s world trade. “The challenge for Caricom countries,” he said, “is not so much access to markets as it is taking advantage of markets which are accessible and that means that Caricom’s real problem is its production platform for exports  what it is producing competitively that the rest of the world is willing to buy or pay for.”

He noted that the average unemployment for the region is about 13% and significantly more in individual countries, adding that for those  who have been educated at the tertiary level the rate of unemployment regionally is only three  percent. “The bulk of regional unemployed, therefore, is the uneducated and unskilled.” In addition, he stressed that the majority of the working population across the region has very limited education.