Rethink funding of university education

Densil Williams, GUEST COLUMNIST

I am uncomfortable with the way we approach public policy development in Jamaica. We seem to think that all we need to do is find policies that work well in one jurisdiction and cut and paste these into our jurisdiction, without paying much regard to the idiosyncrasies of our extant environment. When we are discussing issues of public policy, we generally start by saying, the British do it, the US does it, the Canadians do it, so why can't we do the same?

Commentators who wax lyrical about the experiences of the policy success of the North are the ones we generally take seriously in Jamaica. However, persons who call for a nuanced understanding of our reality are normally labelled socialist, too academic, etc. When policy slippage occurs, we generally turn to these persons after the proverbial horse has already gone through the gate. It is this uneasiness with our approach to public policy discourse why I am calling for a more serious discussion on the proposal on the table to rethink the funding of university education. Our future will depend on this.

I have not seen a formal written report from the Ministry of Education on the matter, but having listened to the minister on talk radio, I heard him to have mooted the position to divert funding from the universities - the ones that are funded from the public purse - and, instead, provide the Students' Loan Bureau with the funds. This will allow students to borrow from the bureau to go to any university of their choice. This is tantamount to giving students a coupon which they can encash at any university of their choice.

If this proposal becomes policy, it will have serious implications for how universities are funded in this country. At the moment, the Government provides subventions to public universities to help them to offset the cost of running their operations. The main sources of revenue for public universities are student fees and government subvention. The amount of government subvention that has been given to universities has been declining for the last 10 years, from a high of 80 per cent to about 51 per cent today. Under the new proposal, it means that if universities want to maintain their current level of offerings, they will have to now compete to attract the highest number of students in order to receive the subvention that is lost.

Level playing field

The proposal will inevitably lead to an increase in the level of rivalry in the education sector. Institutions will be going all out to ensure that the majority of students come to their shop to encash their coupons. The more coupons they have, the more money will be in their coffers.

Now, nothing is inherently wrong with universities competing to attract students. In essence, they do it at the moment. However, if universities are at different levels of quality, and if we assume that students are not bothered about quality but are more interested in getting a degree, this proposed policy will spell disaster for institutions that are viewed as more rigorous in their educational offerings. We can take a lesson from course-hopping within some universities at the moment. Students tend to gravitate towards courses they think have lecturers that are more lenient than others. If this is happening internally, can you imagine what will happen if some universities are seen as easy places from which people can get a degree?

Before this proposal can become policy, it is critical that the Ministry of Education ensure that all institutions where students can encash their coupons are certified by a national body. In other words, if we maintain the University Council of Jamaica, all institutions must be accredited by this body before they can have access to the coupons. The standards for accreditation must be rigorous and meet international standards and all institutions must adhere strictly to them. If this does not happen, I can guarantee you that the commoditisation of tertiary education that will take place will lead to massive underdevelopment of our economy. This, therefore, begs the more important question: Is this the right model to be used to fund university education in a poor, developing country such as Jamaica?

I am sure that we have some consensus in policy circles that the Government's fiscal accounts are in shambles, and it makes it difficult to fund social programmes effectively. In some circles, the argument goes as follows: Education is a social sector and, therefore, if we are constrained in meeting our fiscal targets, this is one social service that can be cut. The not-well-nuanced will point to the metropole and say, 'Look, everywhere they are reducing government spending to universities, so why should Jamaica be going in the opposite direction?' Jamaica spends 6.7 per cent of its GDP on education, while the mighty US spends 5.5 per cent of its GDP on education.

If we step back a bit and look at how the countries in the metropole, like the USA, reached their level of economic development, we will see that education was tertiary education was at the core. When the economies of North American and Western Europe were at the factor-driven stage of their national development, they realised that in order to move forward, they needed to get their economies up the value chain by producing more sophisticated goods and services and sell to the world. To do this, they could not merely produce graduates at the primary and secondary levels. They had to have highly trained university graduates. We do not produce engineers, scientists, software developers, economists, sophisticated entrepreneurs, etc. at the secondary-school level.

higher-order skills

While that level is important for building the foundation in numeracy and literacy, these skills are not sufficient to provide citizens with the correct tools to operate in a complex, global world. The higher-order critical-thinking and problem-solving skills are nurtured and tested at the university level. Therefore, with Jamaica barely making the transition from a factor-driven economy to an efficiency-driven one, it has to start to seriously think about getting more of its citizens into tertiary education so that they can hone the higher-order skills needed to operate in a very complex world.

To get to the innovation stage, Jamaica will have to get more of its citizens enrolled in tertiary institutions. The USA, which is at the innovation stage of its national development, has tertiary enrolment of more than 80 per cent. Norway, another innovation-driven economy, has tertiary enrolment above 75 per cent. Jamaica, a factor-driven economy, had tertiary enrolment in 2009 of 19.3 per cent, significantly below the USA and Norway's. Jamaica has a very far way to go in getting more of its tertiary-ready population enrolled in tertiary institutions, not just places that carry out teaching and call themselves universities, but institutions that are engaged in both teaching and the generation of serious scholarship that are recognised by peers in the academy.

The current proposal does not guarantee that more persons will access tertiary education, and more specifically, university education. Merely trying to shift the burden from the Government to the individual student does not contribute to enhancing the education product in order for it to better suit our developmental needs.

What model is needed?

I have not done much work on the type of model most suitable for our environment. However, from my own knowledge of international development, what is clear is that whatever model is arrived at, it cannot be motivated solely by the need to solve our fiscal burden. The model must be designed to enhance the value of university education to deal with the developmental problems in society.

It, therefore, means that research from universities, which is a public good, will have to be funded by the State. The teaching aspect of a university which has some private and also public benefits (universities also train teachers who teach in high schools, basic schools, etc.) needs to be calibrated well. If you put the total burden for the full cost of education on, say, a teacher, will the Government now be in a position to pay that teacher enough to stay in the classroom at the early-childhood level? Considerations such as these will have to be taken into account before we talk about a coupon system.

The model needed at our stage of development must be motivated by the skill sets that will take us to the highest stage of national economic development, the innovation stage. Having identified these skills, we should then allow universities to design programmes that will deliver on them. These critical developmental programmes should be fully funded by state. Universities should be able to offer non-core programmes, but the full weight of the market should dictate the pricing of these offerings. Clearly, when we reach a higher stage of national economic development, priorities will change, and so do funding requirements. However, I do not think that at this factor/efficiency-driven stage of development, we should borrow slavishly the funding models that North America and Europe are espousing as the model for funding university education in Jamaica.

Dr Densil Williams is senior lecturer of international business and head of Department of Management Studies at UWI, Mona. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and densilw@yahoo.com.