Introduction:
Globally, a greater proportion of privately educated pupils go on to higher education than those educated in the public education system. Not only does this simple empirical reality does not take a lot of analysis and can be explained in a way many of us will understand, its simplicity also hides a lot of generational advantages; for example, it is common knowledge that children from black and Hispanic backgrounds underperform when compared with their white counterparts. (For a greater and more technical argument, see: Joseph Stiglitz: “The demand for education in public and private school system”, Journal of Public Economics (1974); G. Brunello and L. Rocco: “Educational Standards in Privatew and Public Schools”, Economic Journal (2008).
One of the advantages of a private education is that pupils are often privately trained, in addition to their normal classroom experience, to take the key public exams, be they the 11plus, CXCs or final degrees, success in which brings enormous prestige. Such a privatised, exam-focused system does not necessarily produce young men and women with the skills and ability to think critically, indulge in team-working, or carry out complex research, all part of modern higher education and the best working environments. Increasingly, most post-graduate study is now inter-disciplinary and the knowledge-based workplace is an environment of collaborating with colleagues and ideas sharing.
Related Link: Notes From a Native Son: The Role of Education Policy in Development Part One
Development:
Given these recent global developments, the challenge for any national government, battling to divide up fiscal resources, is how best to spend the little available revenue. An efficient and cost-conscious government must be creative in the distribution of funds and sensitive to the challenges posed by similar economies and demands made on the national purse strings by equally important departments. One innovation that is worth serious consideration by a hard-pressed government when selecting young people to go on in state-sponsored education is the way examinees are marked. Should pupils be given an examination, or assessed, or be asked to produce modules, or a combination of the three, when determining who should be given the few opportunities? What is the most advantageous way of extracting maximum intellectual value from our pre and post-graduates students? These are not theoretical questions since they go right to the heart of who should be sponsored by taxpayers.
Finance:
The moral challenge for a small nation, which has the importance of education at its very heart, is how to share the education budget, how to divide up the cake in so many micro slices that each worthy cause is satisfied. What is certain is that the present way of spending the education budget is not the most efficient. Government has a legal obligation to educate pupils from the age of five to 16 (although this should be increased to 18), but beyond that funding is a discretionary policy decision. As things stand, the biggest part of post-18 educational spend is on university students, although this is not necessarily the most prudent way. For all the reasons we have heard and discussed, the cost of funding UWI students is far beyond what is ethically or economically fair. The universal tuition payment is a regressive tax, a subsidy, from the ordinary working people to the children of the middle class professionals and the aspiring working class offspring. The assumptions beyond such a policy are flawed as they assume an equality of opportunity, an underlying principle of social justice, is the driver of the policy. It is not. One better way of funding post-18 education, and in particular higher education, and make it relevant to national development, is for the educational ministry to create a rolling five year educational plan, including the skills and professional needs of the nation, up to 2030 and beyond.
A higher educational and skills training finance pot will then be created from which a sum will be allocated for funding undergraduate studies and skills training, including the subjects and skills, and the number of people who would benefit from bursaries, scholarships, exhibition awards and bursaries. Such a reform will include putting the university on five years’ warning that of the due date it must set up al alternative self-funding structure, with full support from government, part of which would be an allocation of a budget for scholarships and hardship awards. As things stand at present, the Yale Endowment is the best self-funding model, managed by professional fund managers, which in the five preceding years the government would do its best to help establish. Part of this restructuring will include re-modelling the university business model in on a core/satellite basis, removing all the non-core (ie teaching and researching responsibilities) and outsourcing or selling off the non-core business. Accommodation, silver-service restaurant, book shop, etc, will all be sold or leased to commercial or social enterprise organisations. Then there is the question of extra-curricula activities. Is it important that a state-funded university in a small, indebted economy should have a cricket playing field arguably the best in the country? Should students be concentrating on playing competitive sports or studying? Of course, a university having a campus gym is essential, as a healthy body produces a healthy mind. However, those men and women who want to compete national should be encouraged to do so, but through existing organisations. In any case, to compete an international cricketer does not necessitate a university education, and if people simply want to keep themselves engaged then they are free to join independent and friendly clubs.
Economic Costs:
The cost of poor secondary and higher education, expressed in terms of underachievements when compared with similar countries, can be measured in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars of unrealised economic gains. Take, for example, the pinnacle of secondary education, the Barbados Scholarship, first created in the 1920s for the one or two bright students who were too poor to access a university education. To this day, no public audits of the scheme have ever been published by the government; no inventive PhD students have done their theses on the scheme; no education minister has ever thought it relevant to order a study of its post-war (or post independence) performance; and, unforgivably, no media body has every thought it an important information service to offer its readers, listeners or viewers. We do not know what is the total cost, or even its annual cost, who are the main beneficiaries? Were they educated in the ordinary public schools or privately? What is their social backgrounds? Nothing. What is more, we do not know how many have gone on to post-graduate studies and where? What subjects they have studied? Have they formed part of the brain drain? What have been their professional success stories? One thing we do know is that employers, public and private, will prefer to hire applicants with high-quality skills and qualifications and at higher salaries. Improving organisational capabilities can also add productivity value to any institutions, by improving skills, the nature of collaboration, the sharing of ideas and organisational competences.
Post-18 Training:
The funding of post-18 technical and craft training is a subject of special concern. As things stand, if a young man or woman wants to undertake skills training at the Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic s/he has to pay, largely unsubsidised. This is morally wrong. In fairness, all those registering for SJPP should have a full rebate on successful completion of the course. The only people who should face having to pay should be those who failed to complete the course, and this should only be on a case by case basis.
Overseas Expansion:
Unless UWI expands overseas, in other words goes global, it will find that other institutions of higher education will plant their tanks on UWI’s lawns. We already have the offshore medical schools, and an explosion of onshore universities in the US, Canada and Europe, that specifically target Caribbean students and have made specialism of subjects that should rightly be dominated by UWI. To give but a few examples, the University of Florida and Florida International University, McGill in Canada, any number of New York universities, London Metropolitan and Warwick in the UK – all offer more challenging studies of Caribbean-focused courses than UWI. Sometime ago the top brass at the UWI were giving serious consideration to opening a campus in London. It was, and is, a brilliant idea. I was asked if I had any opinions and suggested to the person who approached me that UWI should go ahead and open, but rather than try to compete with the global super-universities, most of which have campuses in London, should cut out a niche area and make a soft launch: Full, part-time and weekend certificates, diplomas and degrees in Caribbean studies, Caribbean history; a variety of law courses, including the bar exams; etc. None of these course would be construed as challenging to the other universities, will be very attractive to people of Caribbean descent and especially to black lawyers who cannot afford the time or expense of going to St Augustine or Mona to take bar exams, but will like the option of being able to practice in the Caribbean. If they want to offer medical training, then recruit in Britain/US/Canada and train in the Caribbean. We know already the islands are popular because the offshore medical have told us so. However, word came back that the senior managers were thinking of opening a medical school. Can you believe that the British medical authorities would sit by and allow these intruders to open a medical school in London without a fight? They may not fault it on academic grounds, but they will, in time, find some ‘legitimate’ way to bar the UWI medical school from operating. Just look at how they treat our banks. The irony of this is that with an invasion of offshore medical schools, the challenge when it comes to medical training is at home, not immediately overseas.
Collaboration:
Senior managers at Cave Hill are understood to be pressuring the government for funding to build a hotel on the ground that it is about to become a centre for Yale University students looking to spend a year based in Barbados. It is a silly idea and one that should be dismissed out of hand. What can a university, not even in the top one-hundred universities in the region have to benefit from having a joint enterprise with one of the top ten global universities? Of course, I see what benefits Yale can extract from such an arrangement, but that is another story. What UWI should be discussing with Yale, however, is its dynamic endowment fund, which has been copied by almost every private US university, but never bettered. Government should put UWI on a five-year notice of its intention to re-structure its funding.
First, from a targeted year, students should be compelled to pay their own tuition fees; this can be done upfront by those whose families are in a position to meet their own liabilities, or alternative sources could be the banks, insurance companies or the government, as lender of last resort. Those obtaining public funding must have a secured guarantor and must arrange to repay the government or an agreed period of time. In the meantime, if they want to leave the jurisdiction of the Barbados courts, they would only be allowed to do so with the agreement of their guarantors, who would be told of the full consequences of defection.
Online Education:
Finally, there should be a system of life-long education, preferably offered online and to which every Barbadian citizen would be given free access. Courses offered should range from basic reading and arithmetic, to crafts, hobbies, languages, in fact any activity that would take mature and retired people to their graves – and at minimum cost.
Analysis and Conclusion:
In 1983, in a remarkable exercise of self-examination, the United States government published a document, A Nation at Risk, looking at the state of its education policies. Whatever the politics, it was a small document of monumental proportions, since it was forcing the most powerful and academically most advanced nation in the world (based on Nobel Prizes and authorships) to take a deep, long look at the quality of its public education. The report was welcomed by most responsible Americans, with the exceptions of most teachers and teaching unions. What was particularly significant about the study was the statement that: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.” Remove the reference to America and replace it with Barbados to get an idea of the dimension of educational decline in Barbados – it is a national strategic scandal.
The myth of a graduate in each home cannot be used as a cover for the complexities and uncertainties of social, economic and educational achievements of domestic cultures nor, indeed, as a substitute for a proper analysis of national development needs. Barbados is badly in need of an educational New Deal, a root and branch reform of a system that has served us well over the last century. But, with historic global changes that are in danger of smothering small nation-states, what is needed is a system that will equip young Barbadian men and women to compete with their peers from all over the world on a level playing field. The promise of post-independence education in small developing nations, is as the main vehicle for social change, equality of opportunity and social justice.
One thing we must as a society get rid of is the idea that higher education is free, that no one pays for it and that the lucky recipient has no further obligations to society once s/he walks away in a graduating gown, mortar board and diploma in hand. That is a myth that first saw the light of day as political propaganda, and has been so successful, that generations later people in Barbados still swear that higher education is free. It is in fact paid for by taxpayers of the current generation or, if allowed to build up as part of the mountain of public sector debt, by future generations. There is a huge economic cost to extending educational opportunities to every home in the nation; but that is the purpose of the social compact between citizens and the state. However, this does not mean that the state should default when it comes to extracting maximum value from its spending. Further, a university education is the biggest driver of career success, a passport to the brain drain (of which the Caribbean is a major loser).
Finally, we need an annual measure of the achievements of our pupils when compared internationally with Singapore, Finland, South Korea, or with St Lucia, Jamaica, or Panama, just to name a few, at ages 5-7, 10-12 and 15-18. Then, and only then, will we know if we are sinking or swimming.
Further Reading:
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Who Chooses Which Private Education? Theory and International Evidence (Guiseppe Bertola and Daniela Checchi)
- The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Richard J. Herrnstrein and Charles Murray)
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