Martin Henry
SUMMER'S LONG, languorous days are sliding to their close. And hundreds of thousands of students will be heading back September morning into an education system which the most recent task force studying its many problems yet again says will need $50 billion to fix.
But if UWI Distinguished Fellow, Edward Seaga, a man who has contributed more than most to the state of education in Jamaica under his former political hat, has his maths right, only 7,600, or 15 per cent of the 50,000 Jamaicans being born annually, end up passing CXC exams. And only 34 per cent are sitting the exams at all. So education does have a distinguished role in wasting young lives.
The universities and several colleges on the semester system have already opened before September morning. With B&B University College advertising its successes on Sunday, I now have a count of seven indigenous universities.
The University Council of Jamaica should have its hands full accrediting courses and institutions. One interesting spin-off from the explosion of degree-granting tertiary education is that for years to come demand will outstrip supply of people with postgraduate degrees who will work for the chicken feed salaries of higher education lecturers, stipends which many of the graduates with only undergraduate degrees quickly exceed in the marketplace.
AFRICAN, ASIAN LECTURERS
There won't be for at least the next generation, and perhaps longer, enough home-grown people with terminal PhD degrees to run higher education, or the financial capacity to recruit them abroad, except from the poorer Third World. There is now a significant number of African and Asian lecturers here who find Jamaica a good and hospitable deal. The system, especially the newcoming underdog portions of it, will run on master's degrees and even some undergraduate degrees for a good while.
And where are the students to come from to sustain an expanding higher education system? Mr. Seaga calculates that only 7,600 students are passing CXCs, although he didn't say how many subjects. Double that number and you will still have a supply problem if each new university is to achieve some kind of critical mass for long-term survival. Mico is boasting all of 935 students. B&B boasted 246 students for the 2002/2003 school year! These numbers are the numbers in medium, small and single programmes in modest-sized universities in North America and Europe!
Incidentally, many of our brightest and best are heading into Ivy League schools in these places, thanks in part to Dennis Minott and some other recruiters and coaches.
The universities are burdened with a heavy remedial load to bring their matriculants up to speed in fundamentals required for university work. The higher ed sector clearly has a strategic interest in what is not happening in lower ed regressing all the way to early childhood. Their feed depends on it.
September morning comes with Education Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson, promising to review the GSAT this academic year. As a placement exam, the GSAT has run into serious equity problems. You cannot achieve equitable placement in an inequitable system which was created historically and cannot be dismantled by ministerial fiat. Choice, location and performance are mutually contradictory placement criteria. The GSAT as assessment exam for primary level achievement has provided a damning expose of the failure of the system, as CXC does for the secondary level.
LOAN SUPPORT
Students heading into tertiary education, even those with not poor parents, will need loan support. The policies of the Student Loan Bureau have come in for just and regular criticisms. Can we hope that the SLB can be steered to a position where proof that the student is borrowing to pursue an approved education programme and can repay the loan will be all that is required to qualify, and the type of toilet at home would be of no consequence except for the private disposal of waste?
Reasonable financing by Government in a genuine revolving loan scheme surely cannot be beyond the reach of a Government dedicated to a revolution in education. Put some PetroCaribe benefits in there and money from the Education Tax and from bauxite/alumina income - but not from the NHT.
One revolutionary step that I'd like to see, and which is backed by economics heavyweights like Milton Friedman, but which no state has had the nerve to practise, is the funding of students and not institutions. Give the child her education money to be spent in a school of choice. Force the schools to compete for students and succeed on quality or die. And watch performance grow. What could be more equitable? But not likely in my lifetime.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
