University of the West Indies (UWI) vice-chancellor Rex Nettleford has made a case for deeper alliances between the region’s universities and other tertiary level institutions (TLI) to ensure the more efficient delivery and broader range of higher education options in a circumstance where people will have to continuously upgrade their training to stay relevant in the job market.

“Strategic alliances between tertiary institutions to optimise quality offerings and effect efficiency gains through cost sharing to minimise dependence on public funds must be on the agenda,” Nettleford told academics and policymakers on Sunday at a conference at the UWI’s Mona campus on the value of tertiary education.

But a substantial focus of the conference was on the financing of university and other tertiary level education in a Jamaica – a hot topic here where education performance is poor and critics say that the nine per cent of the overall budget is too low.

Tertiary institutions get $5.57 billion or 18.5 per cent of the $30-billion education budget. The bulk of the spending in tertiary education goes to the UWI. The government insists that in the context of a tight economic situation and its struggle with a big fiscal deficit there is just not enough money to spend.

Proponents of the idea that tertiary students pay more of the cost of their education – they now pay about 20 per cent of the economic cost – say that savings at the tertiary level should be re-allocated to the lower levels of the system.

At Friday’s opening of the conference, the chancellor of the UWI, Sir George Allyene, warmed the controversy, noting that “there is universal concern for the increasing commercialisation of institutions of higher education” as public and private institutions struggle to satisfy the legitimate demands of society.

“They look to see what aspects of their functions and their physical plant can generate revenue,” Allyene said.

While conceding that such trends may be irreversible, Allyene added: “If the university sees itself having to generate the major part of its income from its entrepreneurial activities, then preoccupation with survival may make it pay less attention to its societal role and the provision of the public goods that only it can provide.”

He insisted that there were good reasons why governments, including Jamaica’s, should provide stable support for higher education:

. Social equity demands that they make educational facilities accessible to everyone.

. In so far that some aspects of higher education represent public goods, government is the agency of representing of the public, which should fund them.

. Tertiary level graduates make returns to the society and the public good, even when these graduates emigrate.

. It is to the public good that there are higher educational institutions which are truly national and which contribute to the wholesome development of society.

. Government support is one way to help ensure that institutions of higher learning do not become fixated with entrepreneurial activities to the detriment of their core functions.

Nettleford, too, underlined the importance of the state taking a leadership role in driving education, although he stressed that this should not mean a monopoly on the process.

Said Nettleford: “It has to be understood.that whatever the budgetary constraints faced by Jamaica and other nations in the region, whatever the seductive sounds coming from the free market camp, it remains the responsibility of public policy, of governments, to propose the direction to be followed; and to enlist the greatest possible number of actors to succeed in a strategy that masters change.

“Indeed, this kind of leadership by the state does not mean a monopoly of the functions employed to move education forward; least of all for the field to be hijacked by ministries of education served by unimaginative pedestrian technocrats who forget that there are certain number of human values that need to be activated and kept alive in human-scale communities like ours.”

Omar Davies, the Jamaican finance minister who, more than two years ago, fired the first salvo in the debate over the financing of university education, raised the possibility at the conference on Saturday of other options for financing higher education, including providing students with a flat subsidy.

At present, at state-run institutions, or regional ones like the UWI, the Jamaican Government covers 80 per cent of the economic cost of the education. Students who do not have private resources can borrow from the government’s Students’ Loan Bureau.

“Maybe we should give a subsidy to the student and say, ‘Go and find your school’,” Davies said.

The finance minister did not flesh out the idea, suggesting that the government was willing to explore all options. Ideas such as limited financing, loans, and work-study programmes need to be looked at, he said.

“There are solutions,” said Davies. “Let us not quarrel about them but rather look for solutions.”

According to Davies, despite the economic constraints Jamaica has substantially widened access to tertiary education. In fact, 8.5 per cent of the eligible cohort is now able to access tertiary training, twice the level of 1960s, he pointed out.

He also pointed to considerable private investment in tertiary education in more recent times.

But Davies feels that students who benefit from state-supported tertiary education should give back to the community, given the “considerable social and economic returns to be realised from investing in tertiary education”. The least of what graduates should do is pay back their loans.

Audley Shaw, the shadow finance minister, argued that Jamaica, if it is serious about development and economic growth, just has to find the money to put into higher education.

“Our universities need more money, not less, in order to facilitate more applied research to support our economic development objectives,” Shaw told the conference on Saturday. “The truth is that we need to significantly accelerate expenditure at all levels.”

Shaw, using United Nation’s Development Programme (UNDP) indexes such as literacy and life expectancy alongside per capita income, drew a correlation between investment in tertiary training and the level of development of a country.

In that regard, he said, Jamaica’s per capita expenditure on education of US$700 per student ($2,700 for those at the UWI) was “woefully lacking”. Jamaica’s expenditure compared with US$10,000 in the United States, US$6,360 in the Eastern Caribbean, and US$6,000 in Finland.

“In Barbados tertiary education is free,” Shaw said.

In Trinidad, of the 20 per cent of the economic cost the UWI applies to students, the government takes up half of it. “The student pays 10 per cent of the (economic) cost and is eligible to free tuition if a means test indicates the need,” Shaw said.

“In Jamaica the student pays 20 per cent of economic cost with possible access to student loans at exorbitant interest rates,” added the shadow minister.

He also pointed out that in some Scandinavian countries all teachers had a minimum of a masters degree and there was universal free education to tertiary level. Those countries had the smallest discrepancy between the best and worst performing students. There was also the fact, he said that all students in those countries at the primary level had access to computers, while in Jamaica only 10 per cent of tertiary students had access to computers.

The result was that countries such as Sweden and Norway ranked first and second out of 175 countries measured by the UNDP, Shaw said.

Stating that Jamaica’s system was way out of line with both neighbouring and developed countries, Shaw called for more resources to be spent on tertiary education.

“With this stark contrast, and against the background of gross under-expenditure at every level, I reject any suggestion from any quarter, that in order for us to spend more at early childhood to high school levels, we should cut funding to tertiary and university levels,” he said.

Nettleford, too, had rejected the “either or” approach to financing education in Jamaica, arguing for an educational context that promotes “learning throughout life” and engagement with the social and cultural environment.

“Thinking and feeling, intellect and imagination are not mutually exclusive as every Jamaican grandmother of yore could have told you,” Nettleford said.

Achieving the quality education that is embracing of the social context while being relevant to the new global environment, Nettleford made clear, “cannot be done on the cheap”, but suggested that expanding the networking of tertiary level institutions was one way to help deal with such issues.

Said he: “So a challenge for TLIs is the strengthening and rationalisation of the institutional and operational networking mechanism between the different levels and categories of educational delivery systems so that the young of this country can become true beneficiaries of an articulated system of education sooner than later. As beneficiaries they should be prepared to plough back into the system .”