PLANNING AHEAD

The response by hundreds of secondary school students to last weekend’s College Fair 2003, for briefing on admission requirements to North American and Caribbean tertiary institutions, was a demonstration of the growing demand today among young Trinidadians and Tobagonians for tertiary education.

The Fair, the fourth of its kind here to be hosted by the United States Embassy, was designed to provide students with “current information on college admission requirements,” tuition and living costs and the availability of scholarships and financial aid. It was a clever marketing strategy designed to attract some of the country’s best young minds, not simply to United States universities, and to enrich the American community in the process, but with the clear understanding that when some of them return to Trinidad and Tobago they do so as unconscious ambassadors of the US way of life and US policy. But on the flip side of the coin, many secondary students for whom receiving a university education in the United States would have been virtually impossible, what with annual tuition and living costs ranging between US$11,000 and US$46,000, have a chance at accessing it. The opportunity has been there for some time. What the US Embassy has done in hosting College Fair 2003 is to bring representatives of the universities and possible students together.

In this way the Trinidad and Tobago students were able to access information with respect to courses offered at the various universities, their average overall costs, and how they could have these whittled down through partial scholarships, or tuition costs eliminated as a results of full scholarships. Financial aid would, in turn, be viewed as of immense benefit. All of this added up to a chance to see, in one fell swoop, how studying at a university in the United States and/or Canada could be within their reach. There is an additional plus that should not be underestimated. The exposure to scholarships available, to bring university education within their reach could motivate them to study even harder for their Advanced Level or CAPE examinations. Admittedly, last weekend’s exercise by the US Embassy was not entirely selfless. Beyond the marketing, including the availability of university representatives to answer questions posed by interested students, the exercise was designed to attract some of the country’s best young minds to American universities and, eventually, to orient them toward toward US thinking. In addition, the United States school system, which has been plagued in recent decades by many students going straight through it without being able to read or write the English language properly, among other minuses, will nonetheless claim credit for the successes of the TT and other foreign students. The Trinidad and Tobago beneficiaries, however, should concern themselves with making optimum use of the educational opportunities afforded them and to see how best they could use them to their country’s, and by extension, the Region’s advantage.