HERE is some good news.

More qualified Jamaicans want to teach. At least that’s what they imply.

For candidates are applying to the island’s teachers’ colleges in droves.

And not just high school graduates with a few CXCs. Highly-trained professionals, too.

Take Mico College in Kingston. In the 1999/2000 academic year, the college had approximately 500 applicants for 376 places. Last year the number of applications jumped 67 per cent to 836.

For the school year that is to start this September, Mico administration officials are currently sifting through 1,386 applications or nearly 66 per cent more than they had last year.

“We have applications from all strata,” says Mico’s registrar, Ruby Simmonds. “We have doctors, dentists and bankers and people who are working.”

So what’s the lure?

A tight economy and a difficulty in finding other jobs, officials say, is part of the answer. Some highly qualified applicants, according to Simmonds, tell the schools that they want a focus.

“But we know they want to migrate,” says the Mico registrar.

For thousands of Jamaicans who want to emigrate, the recent aggressive foray by foreign recruiters into the Caribbean for teachers to work in American and British schools has pointed to new possibilities for going abroad.

The United States, for instance, estimates that it needs about two million teachers by the end of this decade to fill a current shortfall and the growing need. Twenty-six thousand of the new jobs are projected to be in New York State alone, whose school board last year recruited 300 Jamaican teachers, about half of the number they enticed from the Caribbean.

Another 150 Jamaicans were recruited to work in the United Kingdom, where there is a need for about 40,000 teachers. The British might have taken another 100 teachers this past January had not education minister, Burchell Whiteman lamented to the London borough of brent that the recruitment would destabilise Jamaica’s education system.

While the British has placed their recruitment drive on hold, Whiteman and other education ministers from the Caribbean are now preparing to meet early next month to explore the possibility of establishing a ‘Commonwealth Code of Practice’ for the recruitment of teachers.

Whiteman, and other Jamaican government officials, though, acknowledge that in a democracy and competitive, globalised marketplace there is no question of attempting to keep Jamaican teachers at home. The Jamaicans have talked, at best, for some kind of compensatory mechanism for poor countries for training teachers for ‘export’.

Indeed, as has always been the case, economics has been the big tug factor for Jamaicans wanting to go abroad to work.

For instance, a 25 per cent pay hike that has been just approved for New York City teachers will push the starting salary for a trained teacher close to US$40,000 a year or J$1.93 million — substantially higher than J$1.2 million or so earned by principals of high schools and totally out of the ball-park when compared to the under $800,000 a year earned by teachers who have both university degrees and teaching diplomas.

The salaries of Jamaican teachers, however, have risen sharply over the past decade, far faster than any other group of public sector workers and way outstripping the pace of inflation.

But such arguments hardly impress many of those who enter the colleges for the three-year diploma courses with their sights set firmly on classrooms in New York, London and other such cities.

Carl Edmondson, a second-year part-time student at Mico, wants eventually do a degree in London where he has an aunt in school administration. His ambition is to enter politics. Few of his colleagues intend to teach in Jamaica.

“Around 80 per cent of them say they will either go abroad or branch off into another field,” he says. “They say it outright that they will be leaving.”

The teaching diploma — similar to certification in nursing — becomes an important passport, some teachers college officials agree.

“They see the possibility of migration as an added incentive (to join the teaching profession),” says an official at the Shortwood Teachers College, where twice as many people as can be accommodated applied for the 500 places for first year students, up 11 per cent on last year.

“Even the students who are graduating are telling me they are seeking jobs, not in Jamaica, but overseas,” says the official.

It is a perspective substantially shared by Patrick Smith, a former general secretary of the Jamaica Teachers Association (JTA), the teachers union.

Smith agrees that many people have long seen the teaching diploma as a stepping stone to further education or jobs in other professions, but says that in workshops that he now runs for teachers college students about to do their final exams, the discussion invariably turns to overseas jobs

In fact, he says, there have been students doing final year exams, who say they have already signed up for work in Britain.

“Some have signed up via the Internet,” says Smith. “Many of them will tell you that they have friends who have started teaching in Britain, who have lined up jobs for them. When you have somebody writing home to say they are getting £3000 per month, tax free, it’s a definite enticement.”

While the prospect of eventually going abroad is considered to be a strong pull factor for the influx into the teachers’ training colleges, some analysts say that the difficulty of finding jobs elsewhere in the economy may be just as powerful a force.

Sister Avril Chinn Fatt, the principal of the St Joseph’s Teachers’ College, recalls three periods over the past 30 years when, like now, there has been a strong surge in applications. Her conclusion: the applications go up “when the economy is down”.

Adolf Cameron, the current general secretary of the Jamaica Teachers Association (JTA), agrees.

“The reasonable conclusion is that there are not a lot of opportunities,” he says. “In recent times there has been an influx mainly because of the downturn in the economy, (and) jobs are not available in the rest of the economy. When there are jobs in other sectors, the number of applicants fall.”

In any event, he suggests, those who are being trained now are unlikely to find jobs abroad in the near-term. Not only does it take three years to complete the diploma programme, but the recruiters generally ask for teachers with at least five years’ experience.

“You wouldn’t be able to test it until three years time when they graduate from the teaching programme,” he explains.

In that case, the teachers’ colleges, which turn out about 1,000 graduates a year — which is not enough to cover attrition, shift in employment and so on — may not immediately face the crisis that the anecdotal information suggests is around the corner. An estimated 40 per cent of the people who graduate each year never enter the classroom.

If the spin of Wesley Barrett, the chief education officer is still another reason for optimism. The phenomenon, of rising applications to the teachers colleges, he suggests, is to be explained, largely, by the fact that there are just more qualified people to apply.

More students are succeeding at the CXC exams.

“Two years ago I know Church Teachers’ College had about 50 per cent more qualified applicants than they were able to admit and it was the same case with Mico, Shortwood and all of the colleges,” he says. “It’s not just last year, it’s (been that way) for a few years now.”

That may indeed be so, but people like JTA’s Cameron concede that a continued shortfall in teachers in the United States will be a magnet for Jamaicans.

Says Cameron: “If the situation (teacher shortage) were to remain as is … for the next 10 years and (the US and Britain) are looking to countries like Jamaica to recruit teachers… there’s no doubt that people who want to work in the US will see becoming a teacher as the first step.”