Last weekend, the University of the West Indies (UWI) formally dedicated what it expects to be a temporary campus in Montego Bay. The university intends, over the medium term, to build a larger, sprawling campus in the Second City, as an extension to the one at Mona in St Andrew.

On the face of it, this is a good move by the university, responding to, as Mona's principal Professor Gordon Shirley highlighted, "the growing demand for tertiary-level institutions and growth and development in western Jamaica".

Indeed, what people like Professor Shirley and national planners understand is that sustained economic growth and development are not possible in the absence of an educated and skilled workforce.

But increasingly, it is not just any education that will do. Competitive economies demand of their workers the ability to master technology and manipulate information.

Skewed statistics

Unfortunately, the UWI cannot claim to be producing sufficient of those for Jamaica - certainly not enough if Jamaica is to reach its goal of achieving developed-country status by 2030.

Indeed, as this newspaper has been pointing out, the recent statistics of Jamaicans graduating from the UWI are heavily skewed in favour of people with degrees in social sciences and humanities, rather than in science or technology-related disciplines.

This, of course, is not solely the responsibility of the UWI, but partly the failure of the application of public policy in a way to deliver desired development outcomes.

So, of the 3,276 Jamaicans who graduated from the UWI in 2007, just under 1,400 or 42.5 per cent gained degrees in social sciences, while 1,055 or 32 per cent were in humanities and education. Between them, social sciences and humanities produced approximately 75 per cent of the graduates.

Recently, Agriculture Minister Dr Christopher Tufton has been talking a lot about Jamaica's potential danger from the lack of food security and the need to introduce modern, technologically driven processes to agriculture. But, last year, only five Jamaicans graduated from the UWI with agricultural degrees, or 0.152625153 per cent of all graduates.

We did better at engineering. But, even then, there were only 28 graduates, or 0.854 per cent of all Jamaican graduates. Trinidad and Tobago had 373 engineering graduates.

Delivering to society

Matriculation requirements and the fact that it is more expensive to train Jamaican students in the engineering and agricultural faculties in Trinidad and Tobago, perhaps represent part of the reason for the lopsided Jamaican enrolment in social sciences and humanities faculties. But we do not believe that is the whole story, and we believe that appropriate policy would help in a shift.

The Jamaican Government pays 80 per cent of the cost of educating a student at UWI. It might make sense to lower the level of the subsidies to those who want to study social sciences and increase the support to, say, engineering and agriculture students.

It is, indeed, questionable why taxpayers should pay the bulk of the cost for the 411 Jamaican graduates from the UWI's medical faculty, when, if the recent trend holds true, 70 per cent will emigrate soon after becoming full-fledged doctors.

The UWI western campus may make eminent sense, but it has to be in the context of what the university delivers to the society.

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