Correction & Clarification

The printer’s devil struck in yesterday’s Sunday Gleaner editorial. It stated that Jamaica’s debt hovers at around 40 per cent of GDP. That should have been 140 per cent. We regret the error. 

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It is not too late for Roger Bent and his guild of students at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), to recalibrate their approach to the debate on how Jamaican students might best afford university education.

Indeed, it is timely that they should - not just the students at the UWI, but also those at other state-supported tertiary institutions. For, economically, it is going to be a rather rough next couple of years and the Government will have to make some tough decisions on how to allocate already limited resources.

Currently, Jamaican students at the UWI and other government-funded tertiary institutions receive a taxpayer's subsidy of 80 per cent on the economic cost of providing their education. Of the $9.1 billion in recurrent spending, which the Government allocated university education during the current fiscal year, nearly 84 per cent is for the UWI, which, admittedly, has the bulk of the enrolment.

Last week, Mr Bent, who is the president of the guild at Mona, citing the global economic crisis, went public with a call for additional support from the Government. Translation: increased subsidies.

In fact, Mr Bent, backed by the presidents of the counterpart guilds at the UWI Cave Hill, Barbados, and St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago campuses, called for the Jamaican Government to make tertiary tuition fully free, as is the case in those countries. Jamaica's economic situation, though, is more than a little bit different than either Trinidad and Tobago's or Barbados'.

Global downturn

For several decades, the Barbadian economy has grown at an average of more than three per cent a year, the country has high levels of literacy and is ranked in the top tier among nations in the United Nation's Human Development Index. In recent years, until this year's global downturn, Trinidad and Tobago's gross domestic product (GDP) had grown by upwards of eight per cent annually. The government has run strong fiscal surpluses and has been able to invest heavily in the country's physical and social infrastructure.

Jamaica, on the other hand, has been an economic laggard, with long periods of no growth or anaemic growth. Its debt hovers at around 40 per cent of GDP and it consistently runs fiscal deficits, which this year could be close to eight per cent of GDP. In other words, with most sectors badly squeezed by the global crisis, Jamaica has very little economic wiggle room.

In the circumstances, the country is hardly in a position to increase subsidies to UWI students, unless it takes that cash from other tertiary institutions or starves elsewhere in the public sector.

There is though, an opportunity to be creative. For instance, it may be possible for students who graduate from university and agree to volunteer - with a stipend - in prescribed areas of the public sector or designated institutions to have education debts waived and/or rebated. Those who do not might perhaps be afforded only a 50 per cent subsidy.

Mr Bent might also consider it worthwhile to propose a deeper engagement between his university and the private sector for the development of student-placement programmes, through which students might earn while gaining real-world work experience, as well as credits towards their courses.

The first question does not always have to be: 'Please, may I have more - for free?'

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