Sean Nero

Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Fazal Karim has or­dered an au­dit in­to the op­er­a­tions of the bil­lion-dol­lar Gov­ern­ment As­sist­ed Tu­ition Ex­pens­es (Gate) Pro­gramme.

The Gate com­mit­tee, head­ed by Dr Michael Dowlatt, has been giv­en sev­en months to present its pre­lim­i­nary find­ings to the min­istry. Karim told the T&T Guardian he had giv­en the com­mit­tee three months to de­ter­mine the terms of ref­er­ence for the au­dit and de­cide if a con­sul­tant was need­ed to car­ry out the ex­er­cise, or what­ev­er it could all be done in house. He said there were prob­lems in the sys­tem that need­ed to be fixed to en­sure tax­pay­ers are get­ting val­ue for mon­ey in this ef­fort to in­crease this coun­try's knowl­edge ca­pac­i­ty.

"There are stu­dents ap­ply­ing for con­tin­u­ous Gate. Some of them re­peat un­der­grad­u­ate de­grees and that is some­thing I would like to dis­cour­age our stu­dents from do­ing," Karim said."If you went through the sys­tem and you did an un­der­grad­u­ate study for three years, we would like you to go on to a post grad­u­ate of a mas­ters, as op­posed to de­cid­ing that was not the first de­gree I want­ed I will now want to do a sec­ond first de­gree.

"If you spend six years in a uni­ver­si­ty or ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tu­tion, what you are ef­fec­tive­ly do­ing is re­duc­ing the in­take of the next per­son in line by three years. We want to in­crease the ac­cess and max­imise the ef­fect of the tax­pay­er in­vest­ment dol­lars on the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem," Karim said.

He added: "I've held a meet­ing with the Gate com­mit­tee head­ed by Dr Michael Dowlatt, who is chair­man of the Ac­cred­i­ta­tion Coun­cil. I've asked to com­mit­tee to fo­cus on three things–the par­tic­i­pa­tion rate in the ter­tiary sec­tor, sec­ond­ly the grad­u­a­tion rate in the ter­tiary sec­tor, but very im­por­tant­ly as a re­sult of one and two, the em­ploy­ment rates."

At present, Karim said, there were an es­ti­mat­ed 55,000 stu­dents, both full time and part time, ac­cess­ing the Gate pro­gramme. Al­though anom­alies had been de­tect­ed in the pro­gramme, Karim is con­vinced that Gate has been im­pact­ing pos­i­tive­ly up­on the de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy of the coun­try.How­ev­er, he wants to see Gate fund­ing aligned to eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment pri­or­i­ty sec­tors in the coun­try, such the cre­ativ­i­ty, mar­itime, ICT, ser­vices sec­tor and en­er­gy.