Prakash Per­sad

In last week's col­umn, the nexus be­tween re­search uni­ver­si­ties and in­dus­tri­al clus­ters/sus­tain­able in­dus­tri­al de­vel­op­ment was al­lud­ed to. Here in T&T, we have been talk­ing (and are we not good at it) about eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion for decades and we yet are un­able to progress be­yond ten­ta­tive en­deav­ours and rather lim­it­ed out­comes.

Huge sums of mon­ey have been spent on ter­tiary lev­el ed­u­ca­tion. The re­sult is a riv­er of bac­calau­re­ate de­gree-hold­ers and MBAs flood­ing an al­ready lim­it­ed job mar­ket. Uni­ver­si­ty ed­u­ca­tion is in­trin­si­cal­ly good, but if we are to cre­ate new com­pa­nies and jobs, in­creased em­pha­sis must be placed on re­search that is rel­e­vant and com­mer­cial­ly vi­able. This in­vest­ment is piv­otal and crit­i­cal to growth and pros­per­i­ty of the coun­try and by ex­ten­sion, the re­gion.

Wikipedia in­forms us that the ag­gre­gat­ed rev­enues of com­pa­nies found­ed by alum­ni of the Mass­a­chu­setts In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (MIT) would rank as the 11th largest econ­o­my in the world. By way of in­for­ma­tion, ac­cord­ing a 2013 list­ing by the World Bank, T&T is ranked 99th. For those in­ter­est­ed, Sin­ga­pore is ranked 36th.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers