BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) — The five-year-old Indian-owned American University of Barbados (AUB) is to expand its operations here, Education Minister Ronald Jones has said.

“We thought that we would share good news…as you know the American University of Barbados is just five years old. We have walked with the AUB…. It was the first external medical institution to be established in Barbados, and so we have walked with them and they have in fact responded quite well, both in the expansion of numbers and in the quality of their programmes,” Jones said, announcing that the university had acquired new property on the outskirts of the capital.

He said that AUB has also improved upon its recruitment of both domestic and foreign medical tutors, professors and lecturers, “and that has augured well for the interest being generated now across many spaces of the world”.

Jones said that with the most recent recognition of Barbados as a centre where American students could get federal loans and grants, any medical institution in Barbados would be able to benefit from those students coming to them.

“So, that too was and is a signal honour.  Cave Hill (University of the West Indies) was a beneficiary of that as well, and AUB, once they are able to maintain this very high standard would also be a beneficiary of that. It is conferred upon a country and not just an individual or an entity. So, that is important,” Jones said, while encouraging the AUB to keep up its high standards.

The AUB is scheduled to hold its first graduate ceremony as several students are now undergoing training in their clinicals and rotation overseas.

Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, Darcy Boyce, said the authorities had in the past spent many hours trying to determine how Barbados could recapture and improve the position the island once had in the Caribbean as a place for regional education, educational tourism and a significant earner of foreign exchange and a creator of jobs.

He said the decision by AUB to purchase new property “is very important to us because of the significant growth that it represents.

“Because it cements our relationship with a major country [India] in the world, … a country which is going to be much more significant in the scheme of world affairs.”

Principal of the AUB, Meesam Ali Khan, said by investing in the newly acquired property, the university was assuring Barbadians that it intends to have a long presence here.