NANJING, China — Staff members (left) of Southeast University help freshmen who have financial needs with necessary procedures at the start of the new semester in Nanjing, east China’s Jiangsu Province, on August 25, 2018. (Photos: Xinhua)
In an article published on August 19, 2018, entitled ‘Macroeconomic stability, productivity, and the education system’ I argued that in order for Jamaica to make the best use of the macroeconomic stability it has been experiencing for the last five years, it has to focus on productivity.
I suggested further that increasing productivity requires a new culture (one that sees productivity as a way of life) and a revamping of our education system. This revamped education system would, among other things, have the following features:
(a) More focused research by the universities, which will lean towards informing and supporting production and productivity pursuits;
(b) Repositioning teachers’ colleges so that their faculties are more capable of training teachers to facilitate students’ creativity (which is the heart of innovation); and
(c) Expansion, and more strategic deployment, of community colleges in training young graduates in key skills areas to serve the developmental needs of a diverse global, service-driven, economy.
One of the points I did not make explicitly is that in my conception of the partitioning of the tertiary education sector, not every tertiary institution must seek, or (in the case of publicly owned entities) be allowed to become a university. This position is not to suggest that we should not have an abundance of universities, rather it is to suggest that tertiary institutions should be fit for purpose, and public resources should be deployed to enable them to serve their strategically defined purposes.
In this regard I lamented the fact that despite an exponential increase in the number of tertiary graduates over the last 40 years, Jamaica has experienced declines in both multifactor productivity and labour productivity. The concern over the fact that the increase in the number of university graduates has not had an impact on economic growth is not an argument against universities but an argument for fit for purpose.
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