TT’s youths’ future in jeopardy

People, the GATE programme is tax-financed assistance to people who dream of upward mobility either for themselves or their children. It does not represent “freeness”.

Students who benefit from GATE - and not all students seek that assistance - are bonded to the state upon completion of their respective programmes.

In other words, access to GATE financing for university education is repaid through service to the state. What this PNM government is doing is ensuring that the people who are barred from accessing these funds turn instead to the commercial banks for them. But look at this: people who earn upwards of $30,000 per month are expected to pay half the cost of tuition. So this sick PNM led government - one that is firmly in the hands of the rich elite - will exempt the richest minority from having to pay the full cost of their children’s tuition by legally gifting them with a 50 percent discount. While they are doing this, they are at the same time saying to a majority who barely manage to earn between $10,000 and $30,000 per month that regardless of how many children they may have at university, they have to borrow to fund their children’s education. This ensures financial profit for private banks on the one hand or on the other their conversion of “fountain pen money” - money created through debt - into tangible, valuable physical assets when these loans cannot be repaid.

The cost of educating a student at SGU from “pre-med” to MD using bank loans is at least TT $2.1 million after borrowing TT $900,000.00.

But the biggest lie, however, is the PNM’s claim that the money saved - a mere $200 million by their estimate - will “finance the country’s budget deficit”, which they tell us they aim to ‘reduce’ to $2.8 billion in 2016. What dent can throwing $200 million into the pot have on reducing a deficit of that magnitude? No brothers and sisters, every cent that the government cuts from its spending is directed toward interest/debt servicing. In other words, all that money goes into the coffers of local and foreign banks to whom we are indebted while at the same time we are continuously and actively encouraged to borrow more and more by those who own these banks - primarily to service debt. In their ten months in office, they have borrowed $11.8 billion.

I ask: to which financial category do ALL the present students at SGU belong that all of them should be denied access to GATE? Is singling out an institution a criterion for aid? Is it because successful graduates have access to specialist training in the US?

Steve Smith Port-of-Spain