?The Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT) is pur­su­ing ac­cred­i­ta­tion of all its pro­fes­sion­al pro­grammes at the Bach­e­lor and Mas­ter de­gree lev­els, Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter, Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo Min­is­ter has said. Kan­ga­loo ex­plained that the ac­cred­i­ta­tion of in­di­vid­ual pro­grammes re­quired a dif­fer­ent process and UTT chose to first seek ac­cred­i­ta­tion of its en­gi­neer­ing and tech­nol­o­gy pro­grammes from in­ter­na­tion­al­ly-recog­nised bod­ies, ei­ther in the US, through the ac­cred­i­ta­tion board for En­gi­neer­ing and Tech­nol­o­gy, or the Unit­ed King­dom, through the In­sti­tute of En­gi­neer­ing and Tech­nol­o­gy and the En­er­gy In­sti­tute.

She point­ed out that UTT's Bach­e­lor of Tech­nol­o­gy de­grees in elec­tri­cal and me­chan­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing were ac­cred­it­ed by the In­sti­tute of En­gi­neer­ing and Tech­nol­o­gy about four years ago. She added that UTT ap­plied for the ac­cred­i­ta­tion in pe­tro­le­um en­gi­neer­ing and pe­tro­le­um tech­nol­o­gy of these pro­grammes from the En­er­gy In­sti­tute fol­low­ing the grad­u­a­tion of the first co­hort. Kan­ga­loo said that En­er­gy In­sti­tute would ac­cred­it three pro­grammes: Bach­e­lor and mas­ter de­grees in pe­tro­le­um en­gi­neer­ing and mas­ter de­grees in pe­tro­le­um tech­nol­o­gy. She said more than 6,900 stu­dents were en­rolled in UTT at Jan­u­ary 2010. She said 80 pro­grammes were of­fered for the 2009/2010 aca­d­e­m­ic year, UTT's staff stood at 448 and the in­sti­tu­tion had a stu­dent to teacher ra­tio of about 15 to one. (KM)