GEISHA KOW­LESSAR ALON­ZO

Ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion—uni­ver­si­ties and oth­er tech­ni­cal in­sti­tutes—can of­ten feel like gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties re­served for the elite but those gates will be more open to peo­ple while at the same time en­abling these fa­cil­i­ties to make their own mon­ey.

This as T&T’s ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion land­scape is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a trans­for­ma­tion un­der the lead­er­ship of Min­is­ter of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing Pro­fes­sor Prakash Per­sad.

He is steer­ing the sec­tor to­wards a fu­ture de­fined by rel­e­vance, in­no­va­tion and glob­al com­pet­i­tive­ness, while promis­ing a new era of op­por­tu­ni­ty.

Per­sad’s stance re­flects a deep­er shift in how ed­u­ca­tion is val­ued—not just as a pub­lic ser­vice, but as a strate­gic con­trib­u­tor to na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment.

In an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian last Fri­day

Per­sad- a long-serv­ing aca­d­e­m­ic and alum­nus of UWI, hav­ing earned both his BSc in Elec­tri­cal En­gi­neer­ing and PhD in Me­chan­i­cal En­gi­neer­ing at the St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus-out­lined his plans, stat­ing that uni­ver­si­ties and oth­er ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions need to make at least part of their own mon­ey.

Not­ing that tra­di­tion­al­ly, that was not the case, Per­sad em­pha­sised, “Uni­ver­si­ties need to earn their own rev­enue or part of it. It won’t earn all, but a sig­nif­i­cant part. It wouldn’t hap­pen overnight but we have to start the process.

“I’ve been speak­ing to all the ter­tiary-lev­el in­sti­tu­tions, not on­ly uni­ver­si­ties, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT), UWI, MIC In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, the NESC Tech­ni­cal In­sti­tute, et cetera, and say­ing you have to earn a cer­tain per­cent­age of your ex­pen­di­ture.”

How can this be achieved?

Fa­cil­i­ties could serve sev­er­al pur­pos­es—host­ing con­fer­ences, leas­ing space to start-ups or de­liv­er­ing pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices.

In this re­gard Per­sad said they need to ask, “Are you us­ing your spaces ef­fec­tive­ly? Can you rent out some? Can you earn mon­ey from that in­fra­struc­ture that you have? You have re­sources, can you use it more ef­fec­tive­ly?... You have to have a change in at­ti­tude, a change in the par­a­digm...

“An ex­am­ple at uni­ver­si­ty lev­el is I’ve been talk­ing to UTT when I was there try­ing to get the mar­itime train­ing fa­cil­i­ties at Ch­aguara­mas to do more train­ing for the Caribbean, Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca, so that we can earn forex that way. These are some of the things I’ve been telling them,” said Per­sad, a for­mer pres­i­dent at UTT.

He al­so sug­gest­ed that UTT’s ECI­AF cam­pus, lo­cat­ed in Cen­teno, could have a high-tech farm on its 200 acres.

“There’s some­thing called agri-tech, tech­nol­o­gy specif­i­cal­ly for agri­cul­ture. You can train peo­ple and they could start busi­ness­es one time,” the min­is­ter added.

He said com­mit­tees have al­ready been set up in this re­gard to ex­am­ine the fea­si­bil­i­ty of these ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions earn­ing their own mon­ey and be­com­ing more ef­fi­cient in sev­er­al ar­eas.

The first full re­ports from all com­mit­tees are ex­pect­ed at the end of Au­gust.

Apart from rev­enue gen­er­a­tion, Per­sad who led the De­part­ment of Me­chan­i­cal and Man­u­fac­tur­ing En­gi­neer­ing at the St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus, added that ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions need to be more em­brac­ing.

“We want peo­ple to come to uni­ver­si­ties. Peo­ple think that uni­ver­si­ties are kind of closed, they’re ivory tow­ers. We want to make it more open to the pub­lic.

“When you look at, for in­stance, Tamana cam­pus, it’s a fan­tas­tic set­ting, a fan­tas­tic cam­pus. You can have events there. So, what we want to do is to have more ac­cess to the cam­pus, the gen­er­al pub­lic and that way, they will un­der­stand more of the uni­ver­si­ty and the sort of wall that ex­ists be­tween the com­mu­ni­ties and the uni­ver­si­ty could be re­moved.”

Uni­ver­si­ties of­ten sit on un­tapped in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty.

Turn­ing sci­en­tif­ic break­throughs in­to patents, prod­ucts and part­ner­ships could cre­ate new rev­enue streams.

In this vein, one of the com­mit­tee is ex­am­in­ing ICT as Per­sad not­ed cur­rent­ly T&T im­ports for­eign soft­ware but is op­ti­mistic this could be changed.

“We can de­vel­op some lo­cal­ly,” he said adding, “It wouldn’t hap­pen overnight but you can start to earn mon­ey and you earn by sell­ing it al­so lo­cal­ly and al­so re­duce the amount of for­eign ex­change go­ing out,” he ad­vised.

In shar­ing one of his ex­pe­ri­ences while at UTT, Per­sad said that in­sti­tu­tion of­fers a Mas­ter’s in En­tre­pre­neur­ship and In­no­va­tion.

He gave the class a project to turn pee­wah (palm fruit) in­to flour.

When the project was com­plet­ed, Per­sad re­called one stu­dent ac­tu­al­ly start­ed his own com­pa­ny by mak­ing pee­wah flour and this ven­ture proved so suc­cess­ful, it ex­pand­ed.

“He did so well that one of the big com­pa­nies bought him out. It shows that if you take a class­room project and you start to see com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion, you can cre­ate in­dus­try that way. Now, this is some­thing that we have a di­as­po­ra over there that you can sell to.

“So, you earn forex, and cre­ate jobs here. That’s how you start. When you look at large in­dus­tries they are very cap­i­tal in­ten­sive, but low em­ploy­ment. Small com­pa­nies, are not cap­i­tal-in­ten­sive, but they have more em­ploy­ment. It’s some­thing if you want to have more jobs and more com­pa­nies, you need to look at the SMEs, small man­u­fac­tur­ing en­ter­pris­es. That’s what we aim to get stu­dents to think about,” Per­sad said.

How­ev­er, he ad­mit­ted what’s miss­ing at times, is tak­ing that re­search from the lab to the com­mer­cial stage and there­by en­abling that crit­i­cal link be­tween ed­u­ca­tion and sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion.

“We have good re­search, but it stops at uni­ver­si­ty. We seem to lack the in­fra­struc­ture to take it out there and start busi­ness­es...In the US you have a set of com­pa­nies, an­gel in­vestors And they look at it and in­vest.

“What we need to do is to put more in­fra­struc­ture in here to get them to look at our re­search projects and take it for­ward And I think we will do re­al­ly well. If you look at Sil­i­con Val­ley in the USA, most of the tal­ent came from In­dia. We are just as bright here. The world is chang­ing, it’s be­com­ing open. That is some­thing we should look at se­ri­ous­ly,” Per­sad added.

Many have ar­gued that T&T’s high­er ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tu­tions fo­cus too heav­i­ly on tra­di­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic paths.

While Per­sad said this crit­i­cism is still valid there are plans to ex­pand tech­ni­cal, vo­ca­tion­al and in­no­va­tion ar­eas.

“We are do­ing is be­ing more fo­cused to­wards prac­ti­cal, in­dus­try-ready rel­e­vant re­search and cur­ricu­lum. With re­gard to non-tra­di­tion­al sort of skills train­ing, I’ve been meet­ing with cos­me­tol­o­gists, be­cause that’s skill train­ing too. Now you can go and get Botox and in­jec­tions, you know, from a cos­me­tol­o­gist. Peo­ple must say, this is not aca­d­e­m­ic. What is wrong with it? We need to cre­ate jobs.

“We want to make sure it’s done prop­er­ly. We need to have prac­ti­cal train­ing. So we’re look­ing at both.

“There’s too much of an aca­d­e­m­ic em­pha­sis. We need to have prac­ti­cal train­ing. We’re look­ing at both.

High-end re­search, to cre­ate jobs. That’s more long-term, to cre­ate jobs of the fu­ture. But deal­ing with jobs right now, from the en­tire spec­trum,” Per­sad fur­ther ex­plained.

Part­ner­ing with in­ter­na­tion­al uni­ver­si­ties and cor­po­ra­tions could al­so in­tro­duce fund­ing, ex­per­tise and scal­a­bil­i­ty.

To this end Per­sad said ef­forts are be­ing made to have the uni­ver­si­ties link with pri­vate en­ti­ties.

“Uni­ver­si­ties could have shares or eq­ui­ty in the com­pa­ny that they can use. One idea, we have is the fash­ion lab. We have re­al­ly good fash­ion equip­ment but we need to work as a part­ner out­side to have a joint ven­ture.

“These sort of uni­ver­si­ty/pri­vate sec­tor part­ner­ships can earn mon­ey. We are talk­ing to uni­ver­si­ties abroad. We’re try­ing to have more link­ages with them, in­ter­na­tion­al uni­ver­si­ties. For in­stance, there are a lot of peo­ple who are in­ter­est­ed in Car­ni­val stud­ies, like steel­pan play­ing in West Africa, in Asia, etc. We’re’re try­ing to reach out to them on­line and prob­a­bly with the uni­ver­si­ty there al­so to de­liv­er these sort of things,” Per­sad out­lined.

Con­sid­er­a­tion is al­so be­ing giv­en to es­tab­lish a skills data­base at the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry to ac­cess ser­vices from qual­i­fied peo­ple.

UWI Guild wel­comes idea

Vedanand Har­gob­in, guild pres­i­dent at UWI’s St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus wel­comed the idea of ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions rent­ing their spaces.

Not­ing this is cur­rent­ly im­ple­ment­ed at St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus, he said, “The ad­min­is­tra­tion has ac­com­mo­dat­ed a lot of grad­u­a­tions, con­fer­ences, func­tions. I don’t think wed­dings to that ex­tent, but UWI’s fa­cil­i­ties are rent­ed out, even maybe the fields are rent­ed out to the cor­po­rate en­ti­ties or schools for sports days and those kind of things,” Har­gob­in said as he de­scribed the pro­pos­al as “a great ini­tia­tive” and he agreed this should be done on a broad­er scale.