Sir Hilary says level of enrolment in higher education “tragic”

The English-speaking Caribbean has the lowest enrolment of young people in higher education in the entire hemisphere, and a leading academic says this “tragic situation” is impacting the region’s ability to recover from economic challenges.

Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies Professor Sir Hilary Beckles made the comments as he delivered welcome remarks at the second annual Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) Ministerial Summit held in Grenada on Friday.

“If you take our hemisphere, from Alaska in the north to Argentina in the south, and you collect your data on the percentage of young people under the age of 30 in higher education, professional development skills training, the English-speaking Caribbean is at the bottom of the pile. This is a tragic situation,” he said, adding that French-speaking, Dutch-speaking and Spanish-speaking Caribbean nations were ahead.

“We in English CARICOM are at the bottom of the pile in terms of moving our people from primary, secondary and into tertiary,” added the CXC chairman.

Sir Hilary suggested this was why the economy was sluggish in its recovery.

“We are still recovering from the 2007/08 economic crisis because we are not generating the professional skills; we are not generating the professional training, the academic specificity to push innovation, to push economic development, to push transformation, and we have a problem.

“The ministers are dealing with this every day because they have budgets to allocate between their primary, their secondary, their tertiary; they have choices to make. We know that the plumbing is broken in the basement, we know that we have problems with primary education and making sure that every child is given a quality primary [education] and moves to the secondary and performs at the secondary to push through to the tertiary so that we can have the proliferation of skills that we need for development,” the respected regional academic said.

Sir Hilary told the summit that all the models of economic development available, “whether they are economic development models from the right, from the centre, from the left”, all point to the same conclusion that “education is the key to everything”.

He added: “No country can prosper and experience civility without an educational revolution; it is not possible. We all know that a country’s potential for economic growth is an expression of a percentage of its population that has received higher education and, therefore, moving our children from the primary to the secondary to the tertiary is the key mandate for all of us.

“If you don’t have a high proportion of your citizens involved in the pursuit of professional development skills training, academic training, your country will not develop and we know this, we know this. Our fear at the moment, colleagues, is that we in the Caribbean – in fact, I should say we in the English-speaking Caribbean – we have the lowest enrollment in higher education among our young people in the entire hemisphere”.

Sir Hilary, who is also chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, added that one of the reasons he has dedicated so much time and energy to the reparations movement is that he believed the “mess we inherited at independence is still stalking us”.

“All we are doing is cleaning up the mess that we inherited in the 60s. We have not really cleaned up that mess as yet to really break through and really move to the level. We are still cleaning up the rubble that we have inherited at nation-building and I believe that those who colonised this region and created this mess that we have inherited, of inadequacy and insufficiency, have a duty to come back and work with us to clean up this mess. We need it for the future,” he added.
(FW)