Kevon Felmine

Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy, and Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Fazal Karim said the time has come to ex­am­ine ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tu­tions to as­cer­tain whether they are sup­ply­ing suit­able can­di­dates for the na­tion's work­force. He said that tax­pay­ers' dol­lars must be ac­count­ed for and Gov­ern­ment should look at how it was be­ing spent in terms of high­er ed­u­ca­tion.

Karim, in de­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress at the open­ing of the Ac­cred­i­ta­tion Coun­cil's (ACTT) South Out­reach Of­fice and the launch of its dig­i­tal map of reg­is­tered and ac­cred­it­ed in­sti­tu­tions, said peo­ple were gain­ing cer­tifi­cates and diplo­mas and were un­able to ac­cess jobs rel­e­vant to their qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

He not­ed sev­er­al changes should be made, in­clud­ing a re­view in ad­mis­sion stan­dards and oth­er poli­cies to in­crease the re­ten­tion of stu­dents and grad­u­a­tion rates that are con­sis­tent with in­ter­na­tion­al bench­marks. Al­so, that there should be an elim­i­na­tion of aca­d­e­m­ic pro­grammes with low en­roll­ment and com­ple­tion rates that do not meet the coun­try's work­force needs.

Karim said: "I think the time has come for us to ex­am­ine whether the high­er ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tu­tions (HEI) are re­spond­ing to the work­force's readi­ness for our na­tion's eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy at the in­ter­na­tion­al com­pet­i­tive­ness lev­el. "I think the time has come for us to ex­am­ine whether the HEI are con­tin­u­ing along the same path of cur­ricu­lum, of­fer­ing ped­a­gogy with an ex­pec­ta­tion of dif­fer­ent grad­u­ates en­ter­ing the work­force.

"Maybe the time has come for us, as we pre­pare for this coun­try's next 50 years of de­vel­op­ment, to fo­cus on a few ar­eas such as these." He said that pro­grammes that re­duced en­roll­ment con­tin­ued to be car­ried out, de­spite not tend­ing to the needs of the work­force.

Karim sug­gest­ed that fo­cus should be placed on es­tab­lish­ing in­cen­tives for ed­u­ca­tion­al and train­ing in­sti­tu­tions that were in­ter­est­ed in a pur­su­ing these ini­tia­tives. Through this, they may in­crease the par­tic­i­pa­tion rate in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, with­out the high cost of phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture.

Chair­man of ACTT Dr Michael Dowlat said the open­ing of the of­fice would save res­i­dents of south and cen­tral Trinidad the task of jour­ney­ing to Port-of-Spain to con­duct for­mal busi­ness and ac­cess to state re­sources. He said the coun­cil would now be able to ef­fi­cient­ly cater to the train­ing needs of post-sec­ondary and ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tions lo­cat­ed in the re­gions.

The dig­i­tal map, which is ac­cessed through the ACTT Web site, us­es a hy­per­link that redi­rects the page to a Google Maps pro­jec­tion of T&T and dis­plays the lo­ca­tions of ac­cred­it­ed and reg­is­tered ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions. Users can click on the icon next to the tabs and be di­rect­ed to the of­fi­cial Web site of the ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tion they pre­fer.