T&T: Utilitarianism is alive and well

John Spence advocates scrapping Cambridge A' Levels for the Scottish Hgher Examination in order to prepare students for both higher study and work. What is an essentially very thoughtful essay veers off, briefly, into educational utilitarianism when Spence writes:

In addition some of the top scholarship winners are allowed to study at Universities abroad. Trinidad and Tobago must be the only country in the world that ensures that the best brains in the country do not go to our own University (UWI) but study abroad and that at tax-payers expense! Since some of these do not return this must also be the only country in the world that supports a brain-drain financially!

All scholarship winners should be required to study at UWI (or at University of Trinidad and Tobago) and only be allowed to go elsewhere if the course of study s not available at UWI and then only if the programme of study is in the national interest.

What T&T needs to do is provide incentives for graduates to return home and facilitate their entry into the workplace. Instead, graduates who can contribute to the growth and development of T&T are treated with disdain, shunted aside, and have so many obstacles put in the way of finding work in their field that many of T&T's best and brightest return to enrich foreign lands, intellectually and financially. The answer is not educational utilitarianism but development of an infrastructure to facilitate the entry of the graduate into the workplace, or to assist those whose degrees may be in areas in which T&T does not yet envision having an interest. T&T can be on the cutting edge of change if only it would be more welcoming to those educated outside.