The ongoing travails at the University of Guyana have only been exacerbated with the hiring of the new Vice Chancellor, who evidently is determined to impose an administrative structure that will straddle the institution like a Colossus, but like the original, would be little more than for “show”. However, we should not only raise the issue of the governance and administrative structures at the institution; instead it is more than high time we interrogate the very purpose of a university for our country. This is not to say that we do not need a university – but the question that must be asked is, “What exactly is the University supposed to produce for our country?”
We would then be joining a larger debate and discourse that is ongoing in the developed world. They have been forced into this introspection by their economic collapse and with no light evident at the end of their tunnel, they realise that much deadwood will have to be jettisoned. They have discovered that there is quite a lot of deadwood in the halls of academia. And they are not only questioning just the number of PhDs that are being churned out in obscure fields and even more obscure topics. A hard look is being cast at the relevance of the undergraduate programmes.
The bottom line, the powers that be are asserting is whether the degree awarded is worth the investment. On their own, since the 2008 crash in the US, students have been asking this question. One of their responses has been to desert programmes in ‘humanities and ‘language’ in droves and head into fields that are directly connected to available jobs such as in the health field. Suddenly, nursing schools are “in”.
In Guyana, the need for this sort of introspection seems to have escaped both students and administrators. Do we actually need all those graduates in Sociology or International Relations? Are we not just creating trouble for ourselves when the young (and not so young) graduates in these fields cannot find employment? Are we not embarrassed we waited until we struck oil to talk about programmes and qualified individuals in that field? How are we going to make our Technical Institutes more than just dumping grounds for the less academically inclined?
But one development in the US that addresses the need to provide academic knowledge and industry-specific training points in a direction in which we have some experience and which we hopefully can introduce quite quickly: apprenticeships. And since we tend to only copy what is common ‘overseas’, maybe our educators may take notice.
In recent decades, we seem to have bypassed the apprenticeship system, introduced in the sugar industry since the fifties. We’ve opted for some nebulous “internship” system that really does not provide the background and training for its graduates to step into any available jobs. They still need further academic “university” teaching. Apprenticeships, of course, combine paid on-the-job training with college-level or trade-school classes. The Booker’s Apprenticeship Training Programme (now GuySuCo’s) was immensely successful for decades and can become the nucleus for expanding our apprenticeship schemes. Graduates from this institution from the seventies and eighties can be found in USA and Canada occupying very senior technical positions with distinction.
Apprenticeship programmes make economic sense because specific companies – such as the ones in the budding information and communication technology sector, for instance – do not have to look outside the country or towards retraining to fill their personnel needs. In the US, the Department of Labour is trying to expand apprenticeship models in high-demand fields like health care, green jobs, transportation, and information technology.
Another problem with the Technical Institute model that we are expanding at present is that it does not offer the graduates the assurance of specific skills that employers need. The apprenticeship scheme, by combining the employers with the institutions and the specific training, removes that doubt. It also allows corporations to more directly absorb the costs of training their employees.
