Free tertiary education a must
A local businessman is contending that Barbados must go back to offering free tertiary education.
Delivering the 11th Ermine Holmes Memorial Lecture on the topic, ‘Investing in Barbados’, at the St. George Secondary School on Sunday evening, Immediate Past Chairman of the Barbados Private Sector Association (BPSA), Alex McDonald, maintained that “plan one” of the investment portfolio for Barbados must be to rethink how we can better maintain our promise of free three-level public education, while not wrecking the economy.
“It can be done and in fact it must be done,” he contended.
With that in mind, and noting that education is the foundation on which this society is based, McDonald said that free, at the point of access, tertiary education is critical to the country’s continued development. Starting academic year 2014-15, Barbadian students enrolling in the University of the West Indies (UWI) have been required to pay tuition fees, accounting for 20 per cent of the cost of the programme, while Government continues to pay the 80 per cent, referred to as the economic costs. The former BPSA head is suggesting however, that some steps must be taken to ensure that should Government recommit to paying the entire cost of the programme, its decision is not short-lived.
To that end, he is calling for increased matriculation standards for entry to UWI and for Government to invest in a first degree for all who make that standard. However, he maintained that persons pursuing such programmes will have to complete the degree in no more than four years. Additionally, the businessman proposed that “deep credit analysis” of the UWI’s offerings should be undertaken, with the view to rationalising courses and matching those courses to national development goals.
McDonald’s comments came as he suggested that getting the public’s buy-in would not be a hard sell, as Barbadians have always paid for tertiary education through taxation. He explained that it has long been understood that in respect of education, the Peter and Paul Principle pertained, and he maintained that while finding the funds to support tertiary level education has become hard, this predicament is the result of poor choice making and weak governance, at the level of successive government policy making and the UWI management.
“If governing policy ring-fenced or isolated education, being one of the sacred cows of development in this island, better and different decisions about spending choices, ought to have been made. Similarly, if the UWI was cautioned about its capital spending and fiscal campus improvement plans, along with a cautionary warning about matriculation standards we would not have had the perfect storm of economic crisis, weak policies and spending that brought us here,” he surmised. (JRT)