The editorial, on the subsidy to the University of the West Indies, which appeared in The Gleaner, December 2, has sparked quite a debate in the engineering community.

Sadly, the state of engineering in Jamaica is so bad, that most engineers are not practising engineering and are at best used as technical managers. The situation in the Caribbean is not much better. There is little manufacturing, construction and development to keep engineers busy and a number of traditional engineering jobs are now branded as management jobs.

It is easier and much more profitable for a university to produce a business administrator or MBA or social scientist than an engineer or scientist. The reason people do these programmes is usually because their math skills are weak and these programmes are seen as the path of least resistance to a degree. When they graduate they move into high-paying jobs where they proceed to make non-mathematical (non-logical) decisions and create a mess in industry.

Created a financial sector

They then try to hire more people like themselves hoping that talk creative writing or endless meetings will solve the problems. Like the Americans, we have created a financial sector that simply moves around money for a fee but creates little real growth in the economy.

In China, the government is made up of about 80 per cent engineers and scientists, who have created an economy that now accounts for most of the world's manufacturing. Even their prime minister is an engineer! India has a culture of mathematics. They now dominate the world's computer software market. It's just a matter of time before they replace Microsoft Windows with a far superior operating system. After all, the complex aspects of Windows are often written by Indian programmers anyway.

The challenge in Jamaica is to move away from the American model of constant talking and avoidance of anything "hard" to the Chinese/Indian models of production and growth.

I am, etc.,

RUDY ROBINSON

hermitsofold@yahoo.com

Via Go-Jamaica