Grad­u­ates of the School of Busi­ness and Com­put­er Sci­ence (SBCS) were told the Gov­ern­ment re­mained com­mit­ted to ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion. This af­fir­ma­tion came from Dr Michael Dowlath who was speak­ing on be­half of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Fazal Karim. Dowlath, chair­man of the Ac­cred­i­ta­tion Coun­cil of Trinidad and To­ba­go (ACTT), ad­dressed the grad­u­ates at the Hy­att Re­gency, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain, last Sat­ur­day. He praised the aca­d­e­m­ic ac­com­plish­ments of the 385 stu­dents present, stat­ing that as the grad­u­ates left SBCS, they could now look for­ward to be­ing "wel­comed with open arms by a Gov­ern­ment that not on­ly cares but is ful­ly pre­pared to sup­port you in the tran­si­tion from stu­dent to pro­fes­sion­al." He re­mind­ed grad­u­ates of the Gov­ern­ment-spon­sored op­tions avail­able to them, in­clud­ing the High­er Ed­u­ca­tion Loan pro­gramme (HELP), as well as the Gov­ern­ment As­sis­tance for Tu­ition Ex­pens­es (GATE) pro­gramme, which was re­cent­ly ex­pand­ed to in­clude tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing.

Dowlath en­cour­aged grad­u­ates to take part in the re­ju­ve­nat­ed On-the-Job Train­ing (OJT) pro­gramme which would en­sure trainees re­ceive the most rel­e­vant skills train­ing in their field of in­ter­est. He com­pared the OJT pro­gramme to the SBCS, by stat­ing that "in­creased pri­vate sec­tor par­tic­i­pa­tion has be­come a ma­jor ob­jec­tive of the OJT pro­gramme. "It is my hope that grad­u­ates like you can se­cure place­ments in or­gan­i­sa­tions that will pro­vide you with the same qual­i­ty of guid­ance, in­struc­tion and men­tor­ship that you have re­ceived here at SBCS," he added

The grad­u­ates earned their bach­e­lors and mas­ters de­grees from high­ly es­teemed in­ter­na­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions, in­clud­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Green­wich, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sun­der­land and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leices­ter. Grad­u­ates were en­cour­aged not to take the SBCS stamp of ap­proval light­ly but as an ho­n­our. In clos­ing, Dr Dowlath stressed the Gov­ern­ment's con­fi­dence in their con­tri­bu­tions "to the high­ly skilled, com­pe­tent, flex­i­ble and vi­brant labour force as this ad­min­is­tra­tion works to build a self-sus­tain­able na­tion that can com­pete among the best in the world."