I saw with some alarm the ads taken out by UTT and Costaatt a few weeks ago announcing they were now "accredited" institutions. And because disasters love threes, the UWI Today supplement in the Guardian on May 29 ran essays by its campus principals on how brilliantly UWI (also accredited) had transformed the region. Self-congratulation is the constant and all of them, apparently, have "transformed" students and society.
(So do war, famine and abstinence-only sex ed, but leave it.) But have they transformed anything? In these days of the Internet, we can check these state- ments out, at least for the last decade of increased access to tertiary education. UWI, from just over 12,795 Trini students, certified about 3,285 undergraduates in 2008-2009. Project backwards over the decade, assuming steadily increasing admission, that would be 25-32,000 graduates.
Costaatt has 5-6,000 enrolled students (that's a guess-no data on its Web site), and UTT in 2010 had about 10,000 students. Neither Costaatt nor UTT's Web site provides data on graduates, but assuming a similar ratio to UWI, that's about 7,000 from Costaatt and 5,000 from UTT over the decade. All this education has been free, or heavily subsi-dised. If you include private establishments "marketing" foreign degrees, this could mean anywhere from 50-100,000 degrees granted here in the last decade.
What do we get for it? The link between increased access to tertiary education and better social outcomes is well established. Specifically, Eric Hanushek, of the Hoover Institute at Stanford, in his study, Economic Outcomes and School Quality (2005), wrote: "A more educated society may lead to higher rates of invention; may make everybody more productive through the ability of firms to introduce new and better production methods; and may lead to more rapid introduction of new technologies." (Key word: "May.")
The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her book Not For Profit (2010), argues that a good tertiary humanities education makes better citizens, inculcates secular morality, and enables compassionate institutions. Many books and studies echo these conclusions. So one would expect that, having graduated tens of thousands of tertiary students over the last decade, we should be seeing improvements in business, science, and society.
If we relied on local data, we might never know. The international data, however, disagree. If the World Economic Forum's Global Competitive and Innovation reports are reliable, more education is making us worse. The latest innovation index puts Trini-dad at 55 out of 132 countries. By itself, the number is meaningless. But the report ranks Trinidad's "capacity for innovation" at 130 out of 132-we beat Libya and Zimbabwe-and the "quality of the innovation environment in firms" at 104. Not so easy to dismiss.
The latest Global Competitiveness Report ranks Trinidad at 84 out of 132. Again, by itself, meaningless. But (the report continues) the most-cited problems among respondents are crime and the poor work ethic-which should both improve with increased tertiary access. These are not extensive or definitive data, but they are confirmed by the straggly local data: the spike in crime in the last decade; the interpersonal violence across the board, and declining productivity.
I tried to find a comparative productivity index on the CSO Web site, but the statistics were either old or indecipherable. (Go to the site, click on the "Earnings Production Workers 1996-2009" link in "Labour Force Statistics" and see for yourself.) Otherwise, in specific industries like media, consider that Costaatt has been offering a journalism degree, and a couple of those "distance learning" places have been offering undergraduate and master's degrees in mass comm, journalism and media for the last decade.
But the quality of media output has sunk like a stone over the last decade. The same applies to Carnival, which UWI has been "studying" feverishly. There are cultural management and entrepreneurship courses (ACEM), Carnival studies programmes, a Carnival studies unit, and conferences (Th?nk). Yet these (tens? hundreds?) of graduates have not improved Carnival's efficiency, aesthetics, or scholarship. The last UWI Carnival book, Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2008), is as scholarly as a comic book. Read Paula Morgan's essay and see.
So plenty marching feet, going nowhere. Why? One of the reasons is, obviously, the frenzy to get butts in the seats (to improve the statistics to show white people) and this has allowed much poor quality education and educators to get in positions they really should not be in. When I was doing my MA at UWI, I was a little surprised (but not really) that I knew more about one of the courses than two of the three people teaching it-and they knew it too. (Of course, the person who knew the subject was fired.
The other two are still in there, moving from strenk to strenk.) That's UWI-weed out talent, keep the weeds-and UWI is better than Costaatt and UTT. But there are unexpected consequences. In the NY Times on May 14, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska reported on research they'd conducted in US colleges. Students had become adept at "gaming" the system. They chose less rigorous courses taught by weak lecturers who gave good grades in exchange for good student ratings, which are used to determine teacher performance.
And they left with high GPAs but low education. Could such a dishonest, cynical thing ever happen in Trinidad? If it did, it would mean we have institutions of dubious quality, poli-ticians interested only in num- bers, inept teachers, corrupt students. What happens then? Have you seen Trinidad lately?
Continued next week-yep, another epic series