Martin Henry
THE HIGHER education landscape of the country has changed dramatically in the last few years. We are now boasting seven universities, six of which have only come on stream within the last decade. But even now when people speak of 'the university', they mean the University of the West Indies. And by 'the other university' they mean the University of Technology (UTech).
With the multiplication of universities, the most basic resources in higher education are going to be qualified students and qualified staff. I don't know if people are really aware of how thin the numbers of students emerging out of secondary schools with the minimum five CXCs required for matriculation into university are.
The Gleaner, commendably, ran a series of profiles on high performance students coming out of this year's CXCs and several schools published their top performers. Just last Wednesday [16/11] the St. Elizabeth Technical High School published its star performers. Where do these high performance students go? And what do they do?
While the local labour market has very limited room for more doctors and lawyers and even less for pure economists, sociologists and political scientists, the fastest growing careers lie elsewhere.
According to the United States Bureau of Labour Statistics the 10fastest growing occupations and those showing the largest growth in recent years are in auxiliary medical services, information and communication technology, various areas of sales and customer service, hospitality including food services, and post-secondary teaching.
PROFESSIONAL DEGREES
The other university offers professional degrees in the top 10 growth fields and other hot areas like the vast and diverse field of management but has hardly taken the trouble to calculatedly attract high-performance students to these offerings. High-performance students can launch highly rewarding career pathways from UTech. And the other university absolutely needs a solid core of these students for a strong graduate programme.
This week's JIS Bulletin in the papers announced 'GIS mapping to help with crime fighting'. UTech's Faculty of the Built Environment is a base for training in geographic information systems. And with all the concerns about urban space, the faculty runs a programme in urban and regional planning alongside more traditional high demand disciplines in construction, land management and architecture.
A wide range of business management disciplines and programmes in hospitality and tourism are taught and students are hawking these up making the faculty of business and management the largest of five. Holiday Inn advertised on Sunday for front office staff, fluent in Spanish. And the Spanish invasion in hotel construction is on in earnest. One of the features of hospitality and tourism training is the offering of basic skills in a second language. I have often thought that UTech could innovatively diversify its offerings providing greater value-added by attaching a second language to many more of its programmes.
MULTI-SKILLING
The same is true for attaching information technology and management minors to more technical majors. The wave of the future is this inter-disciplinarity and multi-skilling in training and in work, something for which UTech has seriously untapped capacity.
When I read of the new carrot processing plant for Manchester and of broadband fibre optic cables coming in it demonstrates that even in a weak economy graduates from a faculty of engineering and computing need not know what unemployment means. And computing could perhaps better serve UTech and the country by attaching an IT minor to many more areas of training.
A large number of the graduates of the education faculty do little and sometimes no teaching before they take their technical skills to greener pastures. UTech is the only place for degrees in clothing and textiles, apparel, and food and nutrition, but these, and degrees in business studies and industrial technology, are all tied to teaching. The non-teaching demand is high. The faculty should listen. As suggested for IT, an education minor could be offered as an attachment to a wide range of degrees. The national push to upgrade all teachers to degree level has created a huge clientele which UTech's teacher training arm can tap into, offering other areas like language, mathematics, sciences and IT outside of its usual tech/voc zone. The staff skills are there, just not (yet) pulled together from across isolated faculties.
Allied health professions are among the hottest in the labour market. UTech's faculty of health and applied sciences offers a range of these and could reconfigure existing human and physical resources to offer even more.
A recent addition is the composite science and education degree offered jointly with the education faculty. Many more of these market-responsive, inter-faculty degrees are waiting to happen as the second university enters its second decade. UTech can position itself so that 'second' means only in time sequence and nothing else.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist
