There is, in the 2008 audited accounts for the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), a significant, but insufficiently discussed, line item representing income of $1.22 billion.

What, to us, is important about this figure is, first, that it represented earnings from "commercial operations". Second, this income category was nearly $283 million, or 30 per cent higher than in the previous year.

There are two other important points about that line item: one is that the campus' earnings from commercial operations was equivalent to 24 per cent of the little over $5 billion that West Indian governments contributed to Mona. The second point is that $1.2 billion is approximately 12¹/2 per cent of the campus' total income of $9.72 billion for 2008.

Or, if the intent was to make the academic purist cringe, we could possibly note that $1.2 billion represents a larger turnover than that of many of Jamaica's larger companies, including some listed on the stock exchange.

Competing demands

We note these facts in the context of the growing debate over the funding of tertiary education in the face of Jamaica's economic crisis and competing demands on the Government, including its own inclination to channel more resources to the base of the education system.

As the administrators of universities who sat with editors of this newspaper this week acknowledged, this new environment is forcing them to be more creative in how they raise cash. In the current fiscal year, tertiary education is allocated 15¹/2 per cent of the education budget, with the two state-supported universities, UWI and the University of Technology (UTech), accounting for 81 per cent of what is set aside for tertiary institutions, or 12.5 per cent of the education spend. By comparison, the primary system, with its hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of students, was allocated 17 per cent of planned government spending on education.

It will be difficult in the medium term for any Jamaican government to increase substantially real spending on education. So, institutions like Mona, 55 per cent of whose income came from governments, and UTech, which itself raises funds for 60 per cent of its resources, can expect to be pressured to do more. They will have to be more creative.

Ignorance

That line item in the Mona accounts points to one possibility. Yet, it is a single element in what ought to be a rigorous discourse about who should pay, and how much, for tertiary education in a new and competitive paradigm, despite the feigned ignorance of its existence by the traditionalists.

We expect that under a reformed loan system tertiary students will have to carry a greater part of the burden of the cost of their education, except in the event that study subjects are deemed to be of national priority.

Any reform in the financing of tertiary education should embrace, but not be limited to, structured relationships between universities and the private sector, to include robust incentives internship and work/study schemes so as to cushion the financial impact on young people who may find the system useful. As Dr Rosalea Hamilton of UTech also stressed, archaic constraints on the financial management of state institutions have to be removed.

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