The University of Guyana just graduated its class of 2016 and sent off 1628 young persons into their next stage of their life, which for most, would be to secure a job. With statistics over the last decade suggesting that unemployment among their age cohort approached 40 per cent, the expectations of the graduates would be to stand a better chance of securing employment. But does Guyana have job opportunities to absorb this annual influx of “trained” persons from a University that now has an enrolment of 8000?
With all indications that the gold industry is pushing economic growth right now, the answer would have to be negative, since very few of these graduates were trained to function in that industry. And this raises the question from the other side of the equation – how relevant is the “education” offered by UG to the needs of the country? Almost two decades ago, on the cusp of the new millennium, UNESCO declared that the purpose of higher education was to “educate highly qualified graduates and responsible citizens able to meet the needs of all sectors of human activity, by offering relevant qualifications, including professional training, which combine high-level knowledge and skills, using courses and content continually tailored to the present and future needs of society.”
The news reports did not offer a breakdown of the number of graduates per faculty, but if we go by the historical data, more than 70 per cent of the graduates would be females and more than 80 per cent of them would graduate with degrees from the social sciences, arts and humanities. With the glass ceiling for women in general and the dearth of jobs for those graduates, we should appreciate the other relevant statistic that is usually cited when we discuss “higher education” – almost 80 per cent of our university graduates migrate.
The need to make the “education” offered by UG more relevant to the country’s needs is obvious, but concrete steps have been stymied by the unwillingness of successive administrations to integrate higher education with concrete projects for producing goods for the global marketplace, within a Strategic Development Plan that is driven by the Government. Take for example, the Low Carbon Development Strategy unrolled by the PPP Government. There was much talk about “adding value” to the logs from our forest.
But after witnessing the reluctance of the local and foreign companies to make this a reality, if the Government had coordinated a programme at UG to train personnel in all phases of the necessary operations while launching an industrial estate for furniture and other wood products, we could have killed two birds with one stone. This was the approach taken by the Far Eastern Tigers that were able to leapfrog the older long development timeframe of the industrial north.
But there was another opportunity to fuse higher education with Guyana’s developmental needs. The previous Government had made a strategic decision to simultaneously expand sugar production in the country and reduce its production price to be competitive in the residual world market. This was a very rational decision since economies of scale with the Skeldon modernisation and a focus on production in Berbice would feed into each other.
However, the management needs of a sugar industry in the 21st Century that had to be much less labour intensive than in the past should have been tasked to UG to fulfil. Both the new factory and new field operations needed highly trained personnel and this is an aspect of the challenge to the sugar industry that is still not appreciated.
Today, Guyana is on the verge of launching an “oil industry”, which cannot be confined to mere extraction and shipping from our offshore fields. The natural gas, for instance, can become the source for producing fertilisers that would feed our agricultural potential. Why has UG not been drafted into this project, rather than investing million to raise million in “fund raising”?
Higher education must go hand in hand with an industrialisation policy.
