Save early for university fees

The Government is urging parents to save towards their children's university fees ahead of a reallocation of state resources to early-childhood education, a policy which will send tertiary fees skyrocketing in coming years.

Education Minister Andrew Holness told The Gleaner yesterday that the Government would be rolling out a campaign aimed at preparing parents and applicants to pay a greater percentage of the cost of education at higher-level institutions across the island.

"Part of the Government's strategy will be the creation of a social-marketing campaign to encourage parents to plan for tertiary and to start saving early for tertiary education," Holness said.

At present, the Government pays around 80 per cent of the cost for students attending the University of the West Indies (UWI) where students are required to pay a minimum annual fee of about $200,000 to access undergraduate programmes.

According to Holness, the Government will be imploring the private sector to create instruments to facilitate savings for tertiary education.

The Government has said the current system of funding tertiary education is unsustainable.

The UWI, for example, has recently decided to rightsize its operations in light of a $1-billion cut in the subvention allocated by the Government.

Basil Waite, the opposition spokesman on education, says the time has come for Government to determine how much subsidy tertiary institutions should receive.

Reforming the slb

He also said the Students' Loan Bureau, which is the chief lender to persons pursuing higher education, must be reformed.

"Until you outline a plan as to how you are going to capitalise the Students' Loan Bureau so that everybody who wants to pursue tertiary education can have access to financing, then this thing that they are talking about, in terms of increasing the burden on students, ... is a non-starter," Waite said.

The Economic and Social Survey of Jamaica (2009) states that 7.2 per cent of persons enrolled in schools were at the tertiary level.

For the 2009-2010 fiscal year, the Government allocated 13 per cent of its budget to education.

Secondary education received 33.5 per cent of that budget; tertiary students received 18.1 per cent; and early childhood received 3.8 per cent.

A 2009 paper presented by the Caribbean Policy Research Institute stated: "Given the current operation of financial markets in Jamaica, in which loans must generally be secured, a privately funded higher education system would risk marginalising those Jamaicans who come from modest backgrounds but have made it to university or college by dint of their talent and hard work."

Of the 1.1 million people employed in Jamaica in October last year, 117,400 of them have university degrees.