Minister of Education, Ronald Jones; speaking with Dr. Luz Longsworth, Principal and Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI) Open Campus; and Barbara Parris, Principal of Erdiston Teachers’ Training College at the opening ceremony of the 16th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Higher Education Administrators (ACHEA), at the Hilton Barbados Resort, yesterday.
Caribbean companies are being encouraged to do more to support education.
This call comes from Minister of Education, the Hon. Ronald Jones, who believes “there is a high degree of selfishness by many businesses of the region”.
“If they give you $10 000 they feel that they give you the world. But, yet they make their money from the people of the region – the people of the region educate the people for those same businesses. So, I am saying in these alliances, and in these partnerships – just give a little more. Not to hurt yourself, but a little bit more because we still want you to retain some of your earnings to further build out your businesses, to help take in some of the people we are producing.”
The Minister was at the time addressing the opening ceremony of the 16th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Higher Education Administrators (ACHEA), held under the theme “Expectations in Higher Education: Everybody’s Business” at Hilton Barbados Resort, yesterday.
He told participants that part of the problem that is faced as leaders of education, as governments is that they are no longer listening to each other.
“We are quarrelling with each other. Leaders in tertiary education are saying ‘but we want more’ and the government is saying ‘but we don’t have more’. If we give you more, something across the board will suffer… Therefore, how are we going to discuss this in a sensible and rational way, so that we can still roll out the tertiary education project in the region.
“We have to be frugal, we cannot be as liberal as we used to be. And once that happens there is an impact on the institutions, there is an impact on the people who must access this education,” he pointed out.
Further recognising the financial challenges, Jones is urging tertiary administrators to be compassionate, when dealing with students who have difficulties in meeting their tuition commitments.
“You have to understand and work out financial modalities which will help ease them through the difficult periods,” he said.