BARBADOS-EDUCATION: To Pay or Not to Pay?

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Carol Martindale

BRIDGETOWN, Feb 13 1996 (IPS) - The government here might have decreed it the state’s responsibility to pay for students attending the local campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), but the debate on the issue is far from over.

Many taxpayers here are complaining that they do not see why they must continue to fund education for students, many of whom are failing dismally at their courses.

Disgruntled taxpayers have a champion in educator Dr Leonard Shorey who headed a commission charged with providing recommendations for financing tertiary education.

Shorey believes students should pay the full cost of their own tertiary education.

The 12 member commission however, insisted that students pay 50 percent of the cost and that such payment be firmly linked to the establishment of adequate and well planned support provisions for the students.

But the Owen Arthur administration has ignored both Shorey and the recommendations of the commission he headed. The government recently announced that it would pay the three million U.S. dollars it cost to educate 2,208 Barbadians annually at the UWI’s Cave Hill campus. This continues the tradition of state subsidised tertiary education.

“There will simply be no tuition fees,” said Education Minister Mia Mottley.

“We have determined that in the same way we can bring about fiscal incentives and subsidies for inputs pertaining to the economic sectors, whether duty-free for manufacturing or tourism, the government will treat the question of students’ fees as an economic cost that we are committed to pay,” she added.

“It was in a defining philosophical moment that the Cabinet decided to treat education as an economic sector with the full realisation that on a growth path of knowledge-based and skill- intensive industries, the major input of that sector was human resource development.”

The ruling appears to be a bitter pill for many Barbadians to swallow.

Critics of the decision point to data which show that students are failing their courses at an alarming rate. An investigation is soon to start on the high failure rate.

According to data from university departmental reports covering the years 1991 to 1994, as much as 50 percent of those enrolled in certain courses at the institution’s Natural and Social Sciences faculties are failing these subjects.

“This situation is a very disturbing one,” wrote the Shorey Commission on the issue. “It indicates a considerable waste of resources which the country can ill-afford and to which the campus must necessarily be called upon to give serious attention.”

Mottley says the government had already taken a decision to arrest some of the disturbing features which have plagued education over the last decade.

Some of these features she said were negative attitudes and persistently poor academic performance.

The failure rate at the region’s premier tertiary institution is not an isolated one. Barbadian students have been worrying their teachers in recent years, by their lacklustre performances on examinations at lower levels.

Education officials report that 70 percent of the country’s high school graduates leave without gaining certificates for the regional high school leaving test, the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC).

A good CXC pass, meaning five or more subjects at a Grade two or higher level is essential for progressing to tertiary institutions and for entry level jobs in the labour force.