Garcia accuses Gopeesingh of spreading untruths about GATE

At a press conference on Friday at the Ministry of Education’s head office, St Vincent Street, Port of Spain, Garcia criticised Gopeesingh’s claim that the means test to access GATE denied a large portion of the population access to tertiary funding.

Gopeesingh, he said, was deliberately spreading “misinformation, untruths and blatant attempts to misguide the general population.” He said a 2016 comprehensive study revealed numerous vertical inefficiencies within the previous structure.

Of the $700 million spent annually on the upkeep of the GATE programme prior to 2016, 22.4 per cent of recipients were from middle to high earning households, that is, households with income ranging from $9,000 to an excess of $30,000 while, in the minority, lower-earning households with income below $9,000 accounted for only 4.7 per cent of recipients.

Garcia reiterated the criteria for the amended GATE programme.

Drawing on the example of the Social Sciences faculty at the University of the West Indies, whose yearly tuition averages $12,000, he said when calculated monthly, recipients required to pay 25 per cent do not have to pay substantial sums.

On statements made by former minister of tertiary education and skills training, Fazal Karim during the 2011/2012 budget reading, he said, they contradict Gopeesingh’s claims that the new GATE structure is “pauperising the nation.” Karim had said, Garcia claimed, that the GATE programme was problematic and that it “led to the lowering of standards because of the easy access to tertiary education” with many students using the free education as an excuse to programme hop, fail courses and repeat at the expense of the government.

Addressing concerns about the state of unaccredited private institutions such as the School of Business and Computer Science, he said, many of them were in existence long before the introduction of GATE and were not solely dependent on GATE for the provision of tertiary education to students.