Commentary

Quality costs - a lot

THE OTHER DAY there was some uproar over a 10 per cent hike in tuition fees at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, and I was a little annoyed. Annoyed because, while I understand that there are many people here who have it hard, I have always believed that if you want a quality education you have to pay for it.

At J$240,000 annually, tuition at UWI to pursue a degree in medicine is about 600 per cent cheaper than any university where you can get a medical degree that makes the graduate anything other than a certified quack.

That almost quarter-million Jamaican dollars equates to just under US$4000. Where in the world are you going to get a quality tertiary education for that? Not even night school in the United States or Britain comes that cheap.

Who wants to bet that even with this increase in fees the university will not see any drop-off in the number of students enrolled? In fact, I would be willing to take bets that if tuition doubled it would still not make a difference.

It takes money to provide a quality education. The university has to buy equipment, maintain housing and classrooms. Do you know how much it takes to attract a brilliant professor? I am sure that nobody wants to be taught the intricacies of the human anatomy or the precision of abdominal surgery by some bespectacled loon with a crack habit.

Making the sacrifice for that quality education allows the graduate to appreciate his achievements even more and, as such, will seek to maximise his potential offering the very best he or she has to offer. My grandmother used to tell me that nothing too cheap is good and that is what the fees at UWI are now. So, go figure.

How are people going to get that kind of money you ask? Well, check this. Which decent car in Jamaica now costs less than $700,000? But the streets are so jammed with cars there isn't even a rush hour anymore, it's like a rush day! Why can't we use the same means we use to get those cars to get an education? An education, I believe, lasts a lot longer and uses far less gas. In most cases, it doesn't get you as many girls, but it certainly gets you a better living.

Poverty should not be used as a reason why one is not able to acquire an education, but there are many people in this country who would want everyone to believe otherwise.

It is this same mentality that allows that writer of a letter to a newspaper recently to suggest that Mayor Desmond McKenzie's proposal of raising the fine for public urination from $1000 to $20,000 citing that the national minimum wage is only $2500, needs a reality check. What needs a reality check is that being poor is not an excuse to break the law. If you commit the crime, you pay the fine, or do the time whether you are rich or poor.

It is also that mentality that has men running around breeding every woman he comes across so that he ends up with 15 children, none of which he supports. His excuse is that is what men do, especially poor men. What? Does such a man always expect women and the state to take care of his children for him.

There is an argument that when people are poor, sex is one of the few forms of recreation that they have, and that is why there are so many 'unwanted' pregnancies. What, can't someone buy a condom or get one at the clinic? They are free.

It is always interesting to note that the man who can afford to have 100 kids, only has two and the man who can't even afford two, has 100. One simple way to solve this problem is to castrate any man who has more kids than he can afford. After all, how many times does a man need to impregnate some woman just to prove that he is a man? Only a stupid, uneducated person thinks like this, I believe.

And this brings me back to my first point. If you have two kids, you have a better chance of sending them to school so that they can learn not to be as big an idiot as you were. I was never really good at Math, but I think its easy to figure out that to send two kids to study medicine costs much less than having 15 who just want to go to school.