Good education costs

IT CAN cost up to US$80,000 a year for undergraduate education at many of the best universities in the United States. In Jamaica, the full fee in the most expensive University of the West Indies (UWI) Faculty of Medicine is roughly half that amount. And there is a reasonable equivalency in the quality of the offerings, according to international ratings. We often undervalue the education scaffolding which we have constructed.

In both countries, there are elaborate forms of scholarship assistance, as the costs of tertiary

studies are way beyond the pockets of individual families, especially when there are multiple children. Education is expensive: ignorance costs multiples more.

Which brings us again to the unexplained insufficiency of this year’s education budget. For me, this issue is more important than all the other controversy about fiscal affairs, and also dwarfs the scuttlebutt surrounding the minister’s firing. We should rather drive on ‘cyaarpet-less’ roads and have a really great education system, than the other way round.

Take the plight of the traditional high schools right now. These largely Church-and trust-based schools had been getting along with improved government support , for which Ruel Reid deserves credit, along with significant contributions from parents and alumni who know the cost of any quality product.

Their results, though still in need of improvement, have consistently shown the validity of that model. Each one made space for the students whose relatives genuinely could not pay.

MISGUIDED POLICY

Then came Government’s misguided policy, de-emphasising the importance of parental financial support.

The revenues from extra-state sources have dropped sometimes by more than 50 per cent. This was followed by the absurdity late last year, which exempted public servants from contributing to auxiliary fees, which were supposed to have been already abolished anyway.

So some schools have been paying out millions of contributions already received, with the inevitable reduction in their programmes and a recourse to deficit and handto-mouth financing.

This is sheer stupidity. At Standing Finance Committee a few weeks ago, then Minister Reid was kind enough to agree that, provided school budgets were not being padded, the affected schools should send a bill itemising their shortfall to the ministry for reimbursement. I am pleased that this has started with at least four hard-pressed schools. The rest who are affected should follow.

Otherwise, we will continue to face the embarrassment and impoverishment described by the chief executive officer of one of our largest companies, who complains that the university graduate interns who he employs very often cannot write or speak intelligently.

As in the healthcare system, freeness does not equity and quality produce. A proper balance between individual responsibility and State support is required. To this end, a new covenant between the religious organisations, which massively subsidize all levels of education in Jamaica, needs to be crafted with urgency.

All of us who recognise education and training as the only basis for prosperity should welcome acting Minister Karl Samuda’s mature management skills and apparent openness to collaboration. He knows what he does not know, and that is a great quality.

I believe he already senses the waste and duplication in the ministry and in the system as a whole. And I hope he realises that transformation cannot succeed without a genuine, sustained cross-party alliance, which alone can tackle the systemic problems of inefficient teacher training, contracting, deployment, accountability and remuneration, corrupt contracting and imbalanced resource allocation.

There is still time to upgrade the allocation to education and training in this fiscal year, while crafting some radical changes to the way the money is spent.

Good education is costly! Let us afford it now.