CHARLES KONG SOO

charles.kong­soo@guardian.co.tt

For­mer ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion min­is­ter Fazal Karim says the scal­ing down of the Gov­ern­ment As­sis­tance for Tu­ition Ex­pens­es Pro­gramme (GATE) pro­gramme has con­tributed to a “pre­cip­i­tous” de­cline in ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion en­rol­ment in this coun­try.

Karim said that the largest ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tion in T&T, the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, had suf­fered from en­rol­ment dips due to GATE cut­backs as well as re­duc­tions in their sub­ven­tions from the Gov­ern­ment of T&T to fund train­ing, re­search, in­no­va­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship.

He said that all oth­er ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions, pri­vate and pub­lic, ex­pe­ri­enced a sim­i­lar phe­nom­e­non, which was com­pound­ed by very tardy pay­ments for GATE fund­ing that put in­sti­tu­tions un­der se­vere fi­nan­cial cash flow pres­sures.

Karim’s com­ments came in re­sponse to UWI Vice-Chan­cel­lor Sir Hi­lary Beck­les’ state­ment last week that the Caribbean re­gion has the low­est en­rol­ment of stu­dents in high­er ed­u­ca­tion in the en­tire hemi­sphere.

Beck­les made the state­ment dur­ing UWI-Roytec’s grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny at the Hilon Trinidad, Port-of-Spain last Fri­day.

Ad­dress­ing the grad­u­ates Beck­les said “You’re a mi­nor­i­ty with­in a mi­nor­i­ty, un­for­tu­nate­ly, that is a fair and rea­son­able de­scrip­tion of who you are.

“In our Caribbean re­gion, those who have par­tic­i­pat­ed and are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the jour­ney of high­er ed­u­ca­tion rep­re­sent a very small per­cent­age of our pop­u­la­tion.

“The sta­tis­tics in them­selves are very dis­turb­ing; if you take our hemi­sphere from Alas­ka in the North to Ar­genti­na in the South, with­in our hemi­sphere our Caribbean com­mu­ni­ty has the low­est en­rol­ment in post-sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion.

“This is trag­ic for many rea­sons, what we’re wit­ness­ing is an in­abil­i­ty of our youth to find their way through the ed­u­ca­tion­al process to high­er ed­u­ca­tion.”

He said this was al­so dis­turb­ing be­cause all the the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal ev­i­dence that was avail­able showed very clear­ly that there was a di­rect cor­re­la­tion be­tween the per­cent­age of cit­i­zens in the so­ci­ety who had the ben­e­fit of high­er ed­u­ca­tion and the po­ten­tial of that com­mu­ni­ty for sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

Speak­ing to the Sun­day Guardian Karim said “The down­siz­ing of the GATE pro­gramme since 2015 has re­sult­ed in a pre­cip­i­tous fall in ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion en­rol­ment and par­tic­i­pa­tion.

“It has af­fect­ed both the de­mand-side and sup­ply-side of the equa­tion, that is, stu­dents’ abil­i­ty to fund ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion and the culling of pro­grammes of­fered by ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions re­spec­tive­ly.

“The Gov­ern­ment of T&T has sup­pressed da­ta on the ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion par­tic­i­pa­tion rate be­cause of the marked de­cline over the past sev­en years.

“Dur­ing the 2010-2015 pe­ri­od, GATE in­vest­ed $650 mil­lion per an­num on av­er­age and in one year the fig­ure peaked at close to $800 mil­lion.”

He said up un­til last year, GATE was cut to $400 mil­lion per an­num, but this year it in­creased by 13 per cent to $450 mil­lion based on en­er­gy price wind­falls dri­ven by the Rus­sia and Ukraine war.

Karim re­vealed that The UWI, St Au­gus­tine cam­pus en­rolled 18,509 stu­dents in the 2015/2016 aca­d­e­m­ic year and that fig­ure de­creased by nine per cent to 16,845 in the 2019/2020 aca­d­e­m­ic year, even be­fore the on­set of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Ac­cord­ing to the World Bank, in 2020, gross school en­rol­ment at the ter­tiary lev­el for the world was 40 per cent, Karim said.

He ex­plained that us­ing na­tion­al da­ta, the ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion par­tic­i­pa­tion rate for T&T moved from sev­en per cent in 2001 to 42 per cent in 2010 to over 65 per cent by 2015, sur­pass­ing the world av­er­age. He added how­ev­er, the World Bank re­port­ed on T&T us­ing da­ta from the year 2004 at 12 per cent which demon­strat­ed that there was some de­gree of un­der-re­port­ing for T&T and oth­er coun­tries in the re­gion.

Karim said notwith­stand­ing that fact, the Caribbean had his­tor­i­cal­ly lagged be­hind the world in terms of ter­tiary en­rol­ment be­cause of their de­vel­op­ing eco­nom­ic, fi­nan­cial and ed­u­ca­tion sys­tems.

He fur­ther ex­plained that in 2016, Caribbean small states had a gross school en­rol­ment rate at the ter­tiary lev­el of 23 per cent.

Karim list­ed three fac­tors that could be at­trib­uted to this en­rol­ment lag:

(1) sup­ply-side fac­tors with small­er con­cen­tra­tions of ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions and pro­grammes,

(2) de­mand-side fac­tors of lim­it­ed ac­cess to fi­nance for stu­dents to ac­cess ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion, and

(3) stu­dent un­der­per­for­mance and low com­ple­tion rates at the ba­sic ed­u­ca­tion lev­els.

He said al­though most gov­ern­ments in the re­gion con­tin­ue to in­vest in ed­u­ca­tion, in most in­stances, the largest share of the ed­u­ca­tion bud­get was al­lo­cat­ed to pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion. Karim replied that ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion can be mis­con­strued as be­ing dis­cre­tionary when there are bud­getary con­straints.

What are UWI and oth­er learn­ing in­sti­tu­tions do­ing to stem this?

Karim said The UWI was the largest ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tion in the re­gion and had made sig­nif­i­cant strides in ex­pand­ing ac­cess to many of its ter­ri­to­ries.

He em­pha­sised that The UWI, St Au­gus­tine cam­pus, in par­tic­u­lar, en­rolled 6,408 stu­dents in the 1996/1997 aca­d­e­m­ic year which steadi­ly in­creased to a high of 18,509 stu­dents in 2015/2016, an in­crease of 189 per cent over the pe­ri­od.

Karim added that many of the oth­er pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions in­clud­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT), the Col­lege of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ap­plied Arts of Trinidad and To­ba­go (COSTAATT), and Cipri­ani Col­lege of Labour had al­so ex­pand­ed ac­cess over the past two decades, in keep­ing with a Cari­com man­date to in­crease the par­tic­i­pa­tion rate in ter­tiary and vo­ca­tion­al ed­u­ca­tion to sup­port more com­pet­i­tive economies.

T&T has made progress on the “ac­cess” in­di­ca­tor al­though there had been trou­bling slip­page since 2015, how­ev­er, the “rel­e­vance” in­di­ca­tor re­quired more at­ten­tion, he said.

Karim stressed that ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions in T&T and the wider re­gion must en­sure that there was an align­ment of ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing to work­force de­mands.

He said the emer­gence of the In­ter­net of Things, Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence, ro­bot­ics, clean en­er­gy and new tech­nolo­gies had cre­at­ed a prob­lem and an op­por­tu­ni­ty for Caribbean so­ci­eties.

Karim re­marked that if Caribbean so­ci­eties were un­able to evolve in quick or­der, their labour force will be re­placed by ma­chines.

He said, how­ev­er, if Caribbean so­ci­eties were able to train, re­train, up­skill and pre­pare stu­dents for the new world econ­o­my, then their labour force will be pre­pared to com­pete for the jobs of to­mor­row.

GATE was in­tro­duced in the fis­cal year 2004/2005 and was pre­ced­ed by the Dol­lar-for-Dol­lar pro­gramme.

Karim point­ed out that over time, more pri­vate ter­tiary providers were able to par­tic­i­pate in the pro­gramme and nat­u­ral­ly would have in­creased their mar­ket share.

He not­ed that in 2004/2005 pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions ac­cessed an es­ti­mat­ed $32 mil­lion of GATE fund­ing as com­pared to $41 mil­lion for pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions.

In 2014/2015 pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions ac­cessed $213 mil­lion of GATE fund­ing as com­pared to $422 mil­lion for pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions.

Karim said pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions still ac­count­ed for the ma­jor­i­ty of GATE fund­ing and stu­dent en­rol­ment, al­though pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions had grown over the years.

Are there more fe­males than males en­rolling in ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion?

In 2016, the Gov­ern­ment of T&T com­mis­sioned a task force to re­view the GATE pro­gramme which was chaired by Er­rol Simms.

Karim said the GATE task force re­port­ed that for the pe­ri­od 2011 to 2015, the ex­pen­di­ture on fe­male stu­dents was 68 per cent of the an­nu­al GATE ex­pen­di­ture.

He re­vealed that the Glob­al Gen­der Gap Re­port 2021 re­port­ed that there was a skew in favour of fe­males rel­a­tive to males of 1.27 to 1 en­rolled in ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion in T&T.

He said, how­ev­er, na­tion­al en­rol­ment and fund­ing da­ta sug­gest­ed that the ra­tio was ac­tu­al­ly high­er and clos­er to 2 to 1, which de­vi­at­ed from the pri­ma­ry school lev­el which was al­most 1 to 1 – fe­male to male.

UWI re­sponds

The mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions of­fice of The UWI St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus said that Beck­les’ state­ment was in­flu­enced by the UN­ESCO In­ter­na­tion­al In­sti­tute for High­er Ed­u­ca­tion in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (IESALC) in­for­ma­tion cov­er­ing Trends in High­er Ed­u­ca­tion in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.

It added that the UWI Triple A Strat­e­gy cap­tured the uni­ver­si­ty’s strate­gic re­sponse to its cur­rent op­er­a­tional en­vi­ron­ment, in par­tic­u­lar, one strate­gic pil­lar; ac­cess.

The of­fice replied that this en­tailed in­creas­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion in ter­tiary and high­er ed­u­ca­tion for all with the ca­pac­i­ty and de­sire to learn. This will in­volve, among oth­er things, en­sur­ing that The UWI of­fer­ings such as teach­ing and learn­ing, stu­dent de­vel­op­ment, con­sult­ing, re­search and pub­lic ad­vo­ca­cy pro­grammes reached the un­der­served and di­as­po­ra Caribbean pop­u­la­tions and all oth­ers with an in­ter­est in high­er ed­u­ca­tion on all con­ti­nents.

Re­gard­ing sev­er­al of the Sun­day Guardian’s ques­tions, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions of­fice said that they were more prop­er­ly di­rect­ed to the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, not­ing that GATE was not “closed.”

The of­fice re­spond­ed that al­though the pro­gramme was no longer avail­able to post­grad­u­ate stu­dents, it was still avail­able to in­di­vid­u­als un­der 50 who were pur­su­ing un­der­grad­u­ate pro­grammes, and the lev­el of fund­ing was de­ter­mined by a means test.

It an­nounced that the re­cent­ly pub­lished Times High­er Ed­u­ca­tion World Uni­ver­si­ty Rank­ings 2023, as well as its Latin Amer­i­ca Uni­ver­si­ty Rank­ings four months ago, demon­strat­ed the im­pres­sive in­ter­na­tion­al re­silience of The UWI.

The of­fice stat­ed that these rank­ings il­lus­trate how The UWI, af­ter its 2018 in­ter­na­tion­al de­but in the top four per cent of the best uni­ver­si­ties in the world, and then its me­te­oric ris­ing in 2021 to the top 1.5 per cent has con­sol­i­dat­ed its elite po­si­tion dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, and al­so amid a surge in the num­ber of uni­ver­si­ties qual­i­fy­ing for the pres­ti­gious glob­al as­sess­ment.

It said The UWI re­mained the num­ber one ranked Caribbean uni­ver­si­ty and had main­tained its ex­cel­lent po­si­tion with­in the top one per cent of Latin Amer­i­ca’s finest.