KALI­FA SARAH CLYNE

Uni­ver­si­ties in small states like T&T should fo­cus on in­ter­na­tion­al re­cruit­ment and re­cruit­ing mem­bers of its di­as­po­ra as a mea­sure to deal with qual­i­ty of ed­u­ca­tion chal­lenges.The ad­vice comes from for­mer World Bank co-or­di­na­tor for ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion Jamil Sal­mi.Sal­mi said this while speak­ing dur­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI), Open Lec­ture Se­ries on Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion on Wednes­day evening at the uni­ver­si­ty's St Au­gus­tine cam­pus.

He said with an evolv­ing world chal­lenges would emerge for small states to re­main com­pet­i­tive.Chal­lenges, such as main­tain­ing qual­i­ty ed­u­ca­tion, rel­e­vance and fi­nan­cial sta­bil­i­ty."There is a pro­lif­er­a­tion of high­er ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tutes who do not de­liv­er on promis­es and there is al­so a new fo­cus on qual­i­ty and rel­e­vance when re­fer­ring to pro­fes­sion­al skills and soft com­pe­ten­cies," Sal­mi said.

He said world economies were no longer look­ing at rou­tine labour to be rel­e­vant but were chang­ing fo­cus as progress re­quired peo­ple in cre­ative fields and ex­pert thinkers."There is more fo­cus now on de­sign than tech­nol­o­gy. Tech­nol­o­gy alone is not enough. It needs to be mar­ried with lib­er­al arts and hu­man­i­ties to yield the best re­sults."

He added that though there was a fear of hu­man be­ings be­com­ing re­dun­dant as more ro­bots and ma­chines were in­vent­ed to per­form rou­tine tasks, hu­man be­ings were still need­ed for ex­pert think­ing and com­plex com­mu­ni­ca­tion."Tal­ent is the wealth of the fu­ture."Sal­mi told the au­di­ence that uni­ver­si­ties had evolved sig­nif­i­cant­ly over the last two decades, as well as the needs of stu­dents.

He asked the au­di­ence to imag­ine a fu­ture where uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents were re­cruit­ed on Face­book , where stu­dents were giv­en free ipads com­plete with all of the text­books they need and where de­grees would be giv­en from ex­ams and not class­es.He pre­dict­ed a fu­ture where a uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor's salary was de­ter­mined by stu­dent eval­u­a­tion and where a mas­ters of fine arts would be more valu­able than a mas­ter's of busi­ness ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Sal­mi, who has trav­elled to uni­ver­si­ties around the world, says these things are hap­pen­ing al­ready in uni­ver­si­ties around the globe.He chal­lenged UWI to join the world­wide rev­o­lu­tion of the de­liv­ery of ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion.