GREEN ISLAND, Hanover — Caribbean Maritime University (CMU) President Professor Andrew Spencer is encouraging public tertiary institutions to adopt more innovative strategies to secure their financial future.

While acknowledging the challenges that come with limited public resources and competition from deep-pocketed overseas universities, he argues that Jamaican tertiary institutions must move beyond traditional reliance on Government funding.

“We don’t have to depend on the Government. I have told people that every new programme I have must not only be self-sustaining but must be surplus-generating. The programme must not only just pay for itself; it must pay for itself and give a little something to the central coffers,” explained Spencer.

He was speaking with the media after his presentation to the inaugural Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information Higher Education Leadership Conference 2026, held at the Princess Grand Hotels and Resorts in Green Island, Hanover, last Thursday.

Spencer had earlier addressed the conference on revenue creativity in higher education institutions, highlighting some of the measures used at CMU as examples.

“We focus a lot on short courses. In fact, we make almost as much from short courses as we make from our traditional degree programmes. We focus a lot on cost savings, but not in the areas that others would normally focus on. We’ve solarised our campus completely so we’ve reduced our utility costs by 60 per cent, which allows us to have resources to be able to do some of the more meaningful things like having the best technologies,” Spencer explained.

“We have sharing arrangements with UTech [University of Technology] where they use our laboratories — because we have cutting-edge laboratories — and vice versa. It’s a shared approach that will allow us to have these scarce resources give more mileage,” he added.

Spencer also pointed to the importance of institutions concentrating on their main goals so as not to waste critical resources.

“If you’re doing anything outside of your core mandate it means you’re wasting the dollars you already have. You can’t be asking for more while not optimising what you already have, and so that has to be a very singular focus of everybody on the team,” urged the CMU president

He pointed out that the university recently established a non-destructive testing lab with nuclear energy capabilities that can be used to generate funds. There are also other initiatives.

“We are serving the shipping space, and so when you think about when a vessel is in port and they’re using up electricity and using up all kinds of things, we want to be able to sell them… what we call shore power. We’re giving them electricity — they’re already taking our water and paying us for that — [so] we want to give them electricity as well while they’re in port,” Spencer elaborated.

He also spoke about the successful implementation of a scholarship-to-apprenticeship model at CMU where private sector partners fund the tuition of high-performing students from years two through four.

In exchange, students gain experience from summer work and commit to three years of employment upon graduation.

“It’s a bond, but guess what? Everybody wins. I get my tuition, they get the employees that they want, the student gets a free ride through years two to four, and then the students have a job for at least three years after that. These are the creative ways that you have to ‘turn your hand and make fashion’ as old people would say,” explained the senior educator.

Unlike The University of the West Indies (The UWI), CMU receives funding exclusively from the Jamaican Government despite its status as a regional institution.

Spencer has proposed a model to regional governments, based on a direct return on investment. It would see countries paying specifically for the number of students they send to the university, rather than contributing to a general, non-specific pool of funds.

“If you send us 100 students, you pay for 100 students, and you know what you’re getting; as opposed to just sending us a pool of funds which will then be spread across,” he explained.

The CMU, which currently has 3,000 students enrolled, with 400 members of staff and a pretty sizeable plant, is run on an annual budget of approximately $4 billion.

“The Government has increased the subvention over time. It started at $800 million and that has grown to $1.6 billion in Government support, and we’re now having a conversation about how to move that to $2.1 billion. At least it would be at about 50 per cent of what we need, which takes about $4 billion to properly run our space,” argued the CMU head who noted that the $4 billion does not include capital expenditure for upgrades that need to be done to vital parts of its operation.

“We have full-mission bridge simulators — so you can basically navigate an entire ship without going to sea — but that needs to be upgraded now. We have our truck driving simulator — transportation — where we’re training people for 16 weeks and sending them off to North America to be truck drivers, making lots of money. We have our engine room simulator, our high-voltage simulator — all of those things have to be upgraded over time. And I’ve not included that in that $4 billion,” stated Spencer.