Once again we have recruited a new Vice-Chancellor to resuscitate the moribund University of Guyana. He has asked for .2 billion. Maybe it is 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 ongoing debate and discourse in the developed world. They were forced into this introspection by their economic collapse that started in 2008 with still no light evident at the end of their tunnel. They realise that much deadwood will have to be jettisoned and there is quite a lot of that deadwood in the halls of academia.
And they are not only questioning just the number of PhD’s that are being churned out in obscure fields on even more obscure and recondite topics. A hard look is being cast at the relevance of the undergraduate programmes. The question asked by the powers that be is whether the degree awarded is worth the investment demanded.
Interestingly even on their own, since the crash in the US, students have been asking this same question.
One of the response of the latter cohort has been to desert programmes in ‘business’ 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?
We have known since 2000, courtesy of the US geological survey, that we were awash in oil off our coast. It was just a matter of time as to when the real powers that move the oil industry in this hemisphere would decide to pump it out. But we don’t even have a programme in this area, like Suriname initiated some time ago.
And it is not only specialised knowledge in petroleum mining.
What about skills in laying and connecting all those steel pipes that even lay-persons can see will be needed in the oil industry?
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.
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.
Apprenticeship programmes make economic sense because specific companies – such as the ones in the petroleum and 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.
One problem with our “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.
