IS THE OTHER SIDE REALLY GREENER?

Currently in England, students attending university are up in arms against the new government’s intention to raise the cap on tuition fees from £3,000 to £9,000 and, at the same time, to drastically cut government subsidies in tertiary education by up to 80 percent in some areas. A few months ago 50,000 students marched in London to express their rage and disbelief at these moves, even as the British find themselves only slowly recovering from the major recent global financial crisis.

Mr. Keith Burrowes
Mr. Keith Burrowes

As one student protester, quoted in a BBC article asked, “why is our education being cut? Why are tuition fees going up here when in other parts people have free education?”
I should probably note that the situation on education’s spiraling costs is also worsening in the United States of America (USA), with an undergraduate degree at one of the nation’s top universities costing as much as US $200,000. Then there is the situation in which for-profit universities, taking advantage of generous federal student loan grants, have been enrolling people at record numbers, ‘encouraging’ them to drop out or ‘educating’ them with poor standard curricula that make them no more employable than when they started, and in the end leaving them with thousands of dollars in debt to the federal government.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about our situation here in Guyana and to make a quick mental comparison. The University of Guyana (UG) charges some of the lowest tuition fees I’ve ever encountered, with most degree programmes costing about US $600 a year. While there have been talks recently about raising tuitions fees, these to my knowledge have not gone past the stage of conjecture or speculation, as much as it might make economic sense to anyone focused on the institution’s bottom line.
My point is that in this one crucial area, we have one of the world’s richest countries, a place seen as a Mecca for would-be migrants from the developing world, cutting back on one of the fundamental pillars of their development – the right to education – while we continue to place it as a priority in Guyana. There are other areas for comparison, ones which place Guyana in frankly, a more favourable light. For example, while donor support has been crucial to Guyana’s growth over the years, our economy has not reached the stage where it has required any where close to the level of the US $147 billion bailout that the European Union (EU) had to hand to Greece two years ago, with an economically stalled Ireland and a bankrupt Iceland seeming set to follow.
Another area which I’ve touched upon time and again is our health care system: while in the biggest economy in the world, the USA, one might have to write oneself off if one falls seriously ill and is without health insurance; the vast majority of Guyanese enjoy free to highly subsidized health care, inclusive of the provision of drugs.
Finally, there’s the area of job security. Recently, the President of a developed in the west, visited Korea in a failed push to create trade that would result in what was expected to be 70,000 American jobs, an initiative that may be chalked up as one of the failures of his administrations, but one that was reflective of a desperate bid to ensure that American job security at a time when many Americans feel insecure about their employment and when he’s being touted by the American right as the Job-Killer-in-Chief. While, admittedly, Guyana might have some issues with the creation of jobs, we don’t have a situation where people are losing jobs en masse, the Barama incident the exception rather than the rule. Even in that situation, the government has responded rapidly in assisting inn the sustainability of the livelihoods of those affected.
There are two perspectives from which the current situation can be seen: the first is the one that we are accustomed to taking, which says that the grass is most definitely greener on the other side, even while the evidence to the contrary is mounting.
The second perspective is the one that sees that while we may not exist in a perfect society, there are so many pluses to sustaining a life here, in relative comfort, than there exists at present in places once considered ‘greener pastures’.
Things may change miraculously and the developed world might revert to its unbridled and fairly equitably disputed wealth. This, however, is not the trend that is being seen, at least not in my view. The recent global financial crisis, and its continuing economic aftershocks, have originated in and severely impacted upon the developed world precisely because of the phenomenon of the vast majority of wealth being concentrated in fewer hands and the benefits not being enjoyed by the average person. We in the developing world need to recognize the positives that characterise our society and ensure that we maintain them even as the giants are crumbling around us.

(By Keith Burrowes)

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