Last week the Cabinet approved an outline document by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) that is to be the blueprint to lift the country to developed-world status by 2030; which we think is a good thing.

Reaching the target will demand robust and sustained economic growth, rather than the anaemic and stuttering performance to which we have been accustomed for so long; which in turn requires an educated and skilled workforce, whose limitations industry leaders and policymakers often lament.

This, over the long term, requires a radical, bottom-up rebuilding of a badly broken education system. But there is the possibility of short-term fixes, highlighted by some statistics from the regional University of the West Indies (UWI), to which the Jamaican Government this year allocated $9.1 billion, or 87 per cent, of its budget for tertiary education.

Graduating population

In 2007, the 3,276 Jamaicans who graduated from UWI accounted for approximately 41 per cent of all its graduates. Of the Jamaican graduates, nearly 400, or over 42 per cent, were in the social sciences, and over 1,000, or 32 per cent, were from the faculty of humanities and education.

On the other hand, a mere 28 Jamaicans, or less than one per cent, graduated from the UWI's engineering faculty. In agriculture, the number was five - that is 0.152 per cent of all Jamaican graduates. We fared a bit better in pure, applied and natural sciences, but, even here, the 319 were only 9.7 per cent of all Jamaican graduates.

At the same time, Barbados, with a population that is 10 per cent of Jamaica's, had 35 engineering graduates, or three-and-half per cent of all the Barbadians who received UWI degrees in 2007. In Trinidad and Tobago, the figure was 373, or 13 per cent of all their graduates. In pure, applied and natural sciences, there were 340 graduates, nearly 12 per cent of the Trinidadians who earned degrees.

Sustained economic growth

We believe that within these numbers lie some of the reasons for the sustained economic growth enjoyed by these Eastern Caribbean countries, while Jamaica has stagnated, and that the gap will only widen if the circumstances remain. We are sure that social science and humanities graduates have valuable roles to play in helping us to understand the world we live in. At the same time, though, it also requires engineers and scientists, as is proved all across the globe, to drive the innovation that fuels the growth and development that is necessary to sustain modern economies.

Over the long run, with a re-engineered primary and secondary education system, perhaps there will be a greater natural flow of students to the sciences and engineering disciplines. Part of the immediate problem at the tertiary level, however, is cost and the allocation of resources. It is more expensive, for instance, to train an engineer than, say, a political-science graduate.

The Jamaican Government now covers around 80 per cent of the economic cost of Jamaican students at the UWI. Perhaps it is time to begin to reconfigure this, reducing support for the social sciences to, say, 50 per cent, allocating the 'saved' resources to engineering and science students.

If, indeed, we are serious about growth and development, some hard and rational choices will have to be made.

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