STEM summer camp seeking to draw in boys as well as girls, says UTech president

WESTERN BUREAU:

University of Technology Jamaica (UTech) President Dr Kevin Brown says the university’s recently launched science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) summer camp is aimed at getting high school students interested in pursuing higher education, using the technical subjects as a potential gateway.

Brown was speaking to The Gleaner following Wednesday’s launch of the second staging of the STEM summer camp at UTech’s Montego Bay campus. The camp is being staged under the theme, ‘Think, Collaborate, Grow, Be resilient’.

“Access to tertiary education is important and, for us, we want all students to have great access to tertiary education, regardless of gender,” said Brown. “But, I do acknowledge that when you look at the data, girls are doing better than boys across the educational spectrum, so we now need to do more to get boys to take education seriously and to also access tertiary education in greater numbers.

“At UTech, we have a reasonably good gender balance, but I know that at other institutions it is skewed towards females.

“It is something that is of concern to us because we want all boys and girls to have that opportunity to pursue tertiary education and, especially for us at UTech, for them to pursue STEM subjects.

“We are using this STEM summer camp to get more boys and girls interested in STEM at the high school level, because we want them to pursue CSEC (Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate) STEM subjects, and we want to increase those numbers so that they can matriculate into UTech and pursue STEM careers.”

BASIS FOR CONCERN

Brown’s comments come against the background of recent concerns about students’ low participation in post-secondary education in Jamaica, particularly by boys. That worry stems from as far back as 2010, with educators calling for a curriculum tailored toward male teachers and the presence of more males in the classroom.

According to a 2020 UNESCO study, out of all the CSEC examination results for 63,471 Jamaican students between 2016 and 2018, 40.31 per cent of entrants were males compared to 59.69 per cent who were females. That study also cited data from the Planning Institute of Jamaica’s 2019 Economic and Social Survey, which showed that 27,178 males enrolled in tertiary education compared to 50,919 females.

In 2024, Professor Donovan Campbell, the director of The University of the West Indies’ (UWI) Western Jamaica Campus, and Dr Patrick Prendergast, the director of the Caribbean School of Media and Communication (CARIMAC), called for a change in Jamaica’s values and expectations of boys and young men in order to help them to appreciate education.

In the meantime, Brown said more funding and stakeholder collaboration is needed to double UTech’s current annual output of 1,000 STEM graduates.

“We share the ambition to grow the number of STEM graduates that we produce at UTech but, for that to happen, we will need greater funding and we will need to increase the infrastructure. There is a funding and capacity challenge that we will have to take on in the future, and I think that if we work together, between the Government, the university, and the private sector, we can achieve it,” said Brown.

“Right now, we have around 12,000 students at UTech, and we produce just over 1,000 STEM graduates each year, and we want to grow that number, but it will take an increase in the infrastructure that we have,” Brown added. “STEM education is expensive because it is typically a hands-on type of curriculum, so you will need state-of-the-art laboratories and you are going to need to expose the students to a lot more practical application, so you have to ensure that the infrastructure is there to satisfy the curriculum.”

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com