WE NOTE with keen interest that within days of each other the heads of Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS) and National Commercial Bank (NCB), the island's two major banks, have signalled the basis of their support for education in Jamaica. Their presentations have differed in substance and in style but both obviously share a vision about the role of education in fostering economic growth and providing employment opportunities.
Mr. William Clark, Managing Director of BNS, is emphasising the need for specific skills training so that small entrepreneurs can start enterprises that will offer employment to as few as three or four but which, if multiplied, can make a significant contribution to economic growth. The bank's participation in the Micro Enterprise Initiative, established jointly in 2002 with CIDA and the KRC, provides funds for such ventures.
Mr. Clark's overall view is that Jamaicans generally seem to take it for granted that Government will provide jobs for them. He wants to see this psychological dependence severed with school-leavers trained to find employment in the private sector in job categories for which there is strong demand. His emphasis is less on tertiary education than it is on specific job skills so that a student with perhaps six CXC subjects, instead of going to university, would focus his or her interest in some area of specialised training which, combined with a general secondary school academic background, would equip him or her to enter the workforce and start earning a living.
On the other hand, Mr. Michael Lee-Chin, chairman of NCB, has announced a generous scholarship programme for tertiary education which will provide some 200 scholarships over two years tenable at the University of the West Indies, the University of Technology and the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts at a cost of $22 million. This scholarship programme is part of the bank's overall $150 million five-year Jamaica Education Initiative which was launched last year.
Mr. Lee-Chin's emphasis is on the development of intellectual capital at the highest levels and if his example is followed by other financial institutions and large commercial firms, perhaps the present subsidy of 80% of the cost of a tertiary education being provided students by Government could be substantially reduced or eliminated.
We commend both banks for the role they are playing as responsible corporate citizens, ready to reinvest in a system which is the source of their profitability and which needs all the help it can get.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
