Shal­iza?Has­sanali

Econ­o­mist Dr Roger Ho­sein says the Gov­ern­ment needs to be more pru­dent in its de­liv­ery of the Gov­ern­ment As­sis­tance for Tu­ition Ex­pens­es (Gate) pro­gramme. He said it should con­sid­er an in­come con­tin­gent loan pro­gramme or a grad­u­ate tax pro­gramme so stu­dents re­pay the fees for their ter­tiary lev­el ed­u­ca­tion.Ho­sein said ter­tiary lev­el fund­ing must be ap­proached dif­fer­ent­ly in the 2014-2015 fis­cal bud­get, which would be pre­sent­ed by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai on Sep­tem­ber 8.

While Gate has helped im­prove ter­tiary lev­el ed­u­ca­tion (TLE), Ho­sein said there was need for stream­lin­ing of the pro­gramme "to en­sure some de­gree of align­ment of free ter­tiary lev­el ed­u­ca­tion to the longer term struc­tur­al needs of the econ­o­my."In the last eight years, $4.5 bil­lion has been spent on Gate.The fig­ure jumped from $102.1 mil­lion in 2004-2005 to $757.6 mil­lion in 2012-2013, main­ly due to an in­crease in stu­dents' en­rol­ment, Ho­sein said.

"It is dif­fi­cult to say that past gov­ern­ments have pumped too much in­to Gate. What I would say is that we need to con­sid­er more sus­tain­able op­tions to fund TLE with­out mar­gin­al­iz­ing stu­dents from low­er in­come groups."Al­though Gate has in­creased the num­ber of ter­tiary lev­el stu­dents, "it did not dra­mat­i­cal­ly im­prove the over­all growth per­for­mance of the econ­o­my, af­ter 2008 in par­tic­u­lar, when it was most need­ed," he said.

In ad­di­tion, he said, Gate had not as yet trans­lat­ed in­to a di­ver­si­fied pro­duc­tion base for the econ­o­my and some sec­tors re­mained un­der­served."We seem to be still im­port­ing nurs­es and doc­tors. How­ev­er, this may al­so be due to mi­gra­tion in part be­cause Gate is not linked strate­gi­cal­ly to the de­vel­op­ment process but is rather a uni­ver­sal ap­proach to TLE. Fund­ing those ar­eas that have pe­cu­liar needs or needs that re­quire a greater de­gree of em­pha­sis may be un­der­served," he said

Ho­sein said his main con­cern was that Gate was ver­ti­cal­ly in­ef­fi­cient."This means that some peo­ple get more fund­ing than they need. In the case of T&T, some ev­i­dence of ver­ti­cal in­ef­fi­cien­cy is seen in the type of house­holds ac­cess­ing Gate."It can be seen that in­come groups earn­ing $9,000 or more ac­cess Gate fund­ing at a high­er per­cent­age than those in which the in­come group is less than $9,000."

Of par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est, Ho­sein said, was the in­come group $17,000 to $18,999, of which 7.9 per cent ac­cessed Gate fund­ing, while on­ly 0.5 per cent of the in­come group earn­ing less than $1,000 ac­cessed Gate.Ho­sein does not be­lieve the Gov­ern­ment should scrap Gate.

"No. It can't be that sim­plis­tic. I com­mend Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Fazal Karim for all the in­no­v­a­tive changes he has brought on stream so far."Ter­tiary lev­el fund­ing in my view just has to be ap­proached dif­fer­ent­ly. The word scrapped is too dra­mat­ic."

Ho­sein said the econ­o­my was at a cross­road and "it's time to cut back on the huge trans­fers and sub­sidy out­lay that the State cur­rent­ly un­der­takes."