Dr. Bruce Johnstone's 14th Annual William H. Demas Memorial Lecture in St. Lucia

At the May 2013 Annual Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Caribbean Development Bank, Dr. Bruce Johnstone was invited to give the 14th Annual William H. Demas Memorial Lecture entitled Financing Higher Education in the Caribbean: The Elusive Quest for Quality, Capacity, Affordability, and Equity. On the following day Dr. Johnstone gave a presentation to the Directors entitled: Making Student Loans Work in the Caribbean States. The concluding recommendations of the public lecture, which is on the Website of the Bank, were the following five:

1. focus on improving access and success on tertiary education by beginning with the generally agreed upon needed improvements at the middle land secondary levels (and returning Sixth Form secondary education to the high schools);
2. preserving the admirable traditions of collaboration and academic excellence of the University of the West Indies, but redressing an imbalance of resources and attention by devoting more to the Caribbean region’s two and four year colleges;
3. professionalize, strengthen, and above all de-politicize the management of colleges and universities in the Caribbean region;
4. supplement scarce and coveted public revenues with modest and flexible forms of tuition and other fees–in spite of the inevitable opposition that always accompanies the introduction of cost-sharing in countries where higher education has been mainly free, but where governments can no longer sustain the needed quality or capacity of higher education on taxes alone;
5. supplementing the above recommendation with an expansion of need-based grants and student loans (the last-named being a recommendation that needs the leadership of the Caribbean Development Bank).