Dr Trevor Hamilton has made a timely intervention into what we hope will emerge into robust, and ultimately fruitful, debate over how Jamaica allocates resources to tertiary education.

It is a dialogue, hopefully, in which the University of the West Indies (UWI) will become fully engaged without being defensive or feeling that it is being set upon. For, that would be contrary to the ideals of an academy of excellence, where the vigorous contention of argument and ideas often leads to new constructs that advance the human condition.

In this case, the UWI, as the oldest and most-stablished institution of higher learning in the Commonwealth Caribbean, is being challenged to defend its privileged position as a recipient of Jamaican state resources at a time when it is no longer a monopoly or market leader and neither, as Dr Hamilton argued, as broadly impactful or relevant to Jamaica's national development.

Lost its monopoly

Indeed, these are issues that this newspaper has previously raised, if not for precisely the same reasons highlighted by Dr Hamilton in his contribution to The Sunday Gleaner this week

Dr Hamilton's central argument is that the UWI consumes around 58 per cent of the Jamaican Government's spending in tertiary education - we make it in the region of 70 per cent - while accommodating only 30 per cent of publicly funded students, having lost its near monopoly for university education to 22 per cent of the market. But, while the Government spends about two and a quarter times more on a student at the UWI than on a student at the University of Technology or three and a half times more than studentsb enrolled in community colleges, taxpayers receive nothing near equivalent return, except perhaps in the health sciences.

Using socio-economic trends as rough proxies for performance, Dr Hamilton notes that while Jamaica's investment in the UWI grew by over nine per cent annually in the 27 years to 2007, economic growth averaged only 1.2 per cent and social disorder, measured by the country's rising murder rate - 8.1 per cent a year - worsened.

Boys like school too

Additionally, he points to the UWI's failure to attract men. At the university's Mona, Jamaica campus, for example, over 70 per cent of the students are female. Significantly, Dr Hamilton rejects the oft-declared reason that Jamaican men opt out of education, pointing to significantly higher male enrolment in other institutions.

"The belief that men and boys don't like school is a myth," he writes. "They like school with significant infusions of technology and new-economy knowledge."

Indeed, in previous comments, this newspaper pointed to the fact that in 2007, over 70 per cent of the Jamaican graduates from the UWI were in the humanities and social sciences and only 10.5 per cent were in pure and applied sciences or engineering. This is unsustainable if Jamaica is to build a modern, competitive economy and we believe that there should be a rebalancing of resources at the UWI - particularly with regard to subsidies to students - in favour of engineering and the sciences.

But there is much merit, we believe, in Dr Hamilton's call for rebalancing of another kind: The shifting from current 'upside-down' priorities to pumping more of the country's limited resources into early childhood and primary education. In that regard, the Government will have to prise the UWI's hand from its near stranglehold on the tertiary purse.

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