News Releases

Cave Hill Enterprise for Development

For Release Upon Receipt - February 22, 2010

Cave Hill


The challenges facing our country and campus as we prepare citizens for this long century are many and interlocked. 

We have embarked on a project to build a world class university environment at Cave Hill.  We have created a network of support: governments, private sector, alumni and international donors. We have signed Memoranda of Understanding with dozens of distinguished universities to enable the exchange of students and professors, and to integrate international best practices into our system.  We have globalised Cave Hill in order to ensure its sustainability.

But there are challenges.  Some of these are related to rising costs, and others to the stresses and strains of transformation, structural change, growth and expansion.    Some of these are short term, others systemic, but we are aware of them and have developed management strategies.

Creating and sustaining a first class university in a developing country is no easy matter. We have had to be at once bold and cautious, courageous and careful.  There is little room for error, but risks we must take.  Some Caribbean economies are in crisis, and the outlook for this decade is not encouraging. 

We have endemic macro-economic challenges in the funding model for the university.  There is a tendency for the unit cost in higher education everywhere to rise at a faster rate than the unit cost in other areas of the economy.  Quality university education generally requires a high investment, and if well done reaps returns that are extremely valuable to society. We have an opportunity to engage public policy makers in government and private sector on how best to invest scarce resources in The University to build our social capital for development.

The organizing concept we used in our strategic plan, 2002-2007, was “at least one graduate per household”.   This enabled us to focus on expansion of access by all citizens. Access to university education has been the most reliable poverty alleviator in Barbados, and the basis on which we created new professional classes that have driven economic growth. “Building knowledge households” is the language we are using in the Strategic Plan, 2007 – 2012.

 The growth of students at Cave Hill has been satisfactory, moving from some 3,000 to near 9,000 between the end of the 20th Century to 2010.  In a shorter period, the St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Tobago has had equally spectacular growth, reaching a level of 16,000. The Government of Trinidad and Tobago adopted the Barbados funding model;  St. Augustine is now UWI’s largest physical Campus, surpassing Mona’s enrolment of  13,000 students.  Meanwhile the total UWI enrolment has grown from 24, 000 to 46, 000 in the decade.

The growth of Cave Hill’s enrolment has unlocked the full potential of Barbadian citizens, and has unleashed the desire of the youth for education, and mature citizens for professional advancement.  It has also lowered the per capita cost of Cave Hill from the highest of the campuses to the lowest.  We are now more efficient than ever before in resource use.

But this growth has raised questions about ‘quality’, an academic concept generally misunderstood in popular discussion, but one that requires clarity of comprehension for debate on the future of the university enterprise.

 A ‘quality’ university is one that serves the development needs of the community that funds it; that is, its fitness to deliver on the purposes for which it was established.  The next step is to drill  down and look at the quality of the student intake, its output as graduates, the quality of  senior academics, teaching skills and competence, relevance of research, the quality of physical facilities, the modernity of the learning environment, and of course the  social provisions made for students to enjoy the learning experiences.

 Critically, a campus should have rules, regulations, and institutional systems to measure, audit, report, regulate, and enhance all of these features, and how they interrelate.  This is known as the quality assurance system. It is required in order to achieve national and international accreditation, and importantly, programme recognition to assure graduate global mobility.

At Cave Hill we have gone about quality assurance very scientifically, and have received national, regional and international recognition for our success.  This does not mean that we do not have ongoing problems, but there are mechanisms for their correction. 

All students who enter the Cave Hill Campus are qualified to enter, having met the university’s matriculation requirements as set out centrally by the Senate of the University.   Cave Hill has not, and cannot, offend these requirements. A greater cross section of student competencies now enters the campuses, which is normal to all universities that have a non-elitist access policy.

In the early 1970s changes to the university matriculation regulations enabled more students to enter with what is known as “lower level matriculation”, that is students with five or more ‘O’ Levels and later CXCs who enrolled in a “4 year” as opposed to a “3 year” degree.  The Faculties of Law and Medicine held strictly to an ‘A’ level requirement.  This policy accommodated Cave Hill and later Mona.  St. Augustine held more closely to the traditional route because the government built more sixth forms,  community colleges, and technical institutes. But a Lower level matriculation student does not necessarily perform less satisfactory than a “full” matriculation student.  All students go through a learning experience in order to reach  the required standard for graduation.

Teachers more than before are challenged to be more creative and innovative, and Faculties to be development-oriented towards students.  A larger number of students are a challenge to teachers, and present an opportunity to test their commitment and skills.  But, they should not be condemned nor dismissed.  Very proficient students bring blessings as well as challenges of their own.

 In addition, there has also been a radical transformation in the age composition of the Cave Hill student population.  In the 1980s the average age was about 30; mature students were the norm.  They were easier to teach and less challenging.  Today near 60% of the students are under 24.  The Cave Hill student is now mostly a school leaver.  Young students have changed the identity of the campus; they have different attitudes, aptitudes, and are not fairly to be compared with their older predecessors.  A few colleagues who taught during the 1980s are challenged to adjust to this explosion of youth on the campus.  Not all of us from the old school are equipped to communicate with the burgeoning new cohort. They have special needs.  To this end we have now required that all new lecturers must undergo teacher training. Many of these young persons do not have enough experience with independent learning. But they qualify to enter and we are rising to the challenge of developing them.

We have also been tracking the growth and quality of academic staff.  We measure these variables, and benchmark them in comparison with the other UWI campuses, and comparable public British and American universities.  We also audit the growth of teaching facilities. The new buildings that have sprung up, many financed by the private sector, are a response to this scientific planning process and the need to provide high quality teaching spaces.

The reviewing and auditing of the quality process is undertaken by the Campus Quality Management Team and the University-wide Quality Assurance Unit.  Cave Hill is intensely audited for quality, and Faculties have done very well in implementing critical quality recommendations.  Recently the campus was audited by the Barbados Accreditation Council. This was a vigorous process of comprehensive scrutiny, undertaken by a team of national and international experts.  We were satisfied with the conclusion  reached in its Report that “Cave Hill Campus has appropriate measures in place to deal with students entering with a range of levels of prior attainment”, and that there are highly developed special programmes for Maths and English Language enhancement.

With respect to the product that is a Cave Hill graduate, what obtains is the normal distribution found in all universities. Generally speaking, about ten percent of them might be classified as “exceptional”, another 20% very good, 40% good, and the remaining 30%, average.  What some teachers and employers have experienced is the growth of the ‘average’: 30% of 2000 was not good, but 30% of 8,000 is disturbing. 

Employers in Barbados now have to learn, as they did in England and the USA, how to distinguish between different levels of graduates, and not assume that all graduates are the same quality, or should be. The Barbados public especially has to be schooled in this understanding.  But graduates at the lowest level of performance also have a very important role to play as a developed human resource.

Our students now have first class sports and co-curricula facilities and have done very well, winning national, regional, and international competitions.  Student leaders have become the co-creators of the new campus environment.

Cave Hill, like Mona and St. Augustine at an earlier time, has taken off.  Now we must manage change the best we can.  Not everyone has welcomed the change, and some have resisted; others are critical.  But the university leadership has done this by building collaborative relationships with the support of government, the private sector, and the commitment of the campus community.

Cave Hill is on the threshold of becoming a cutting edge physical and electronic learning environment.  It will serve Barbados and the region even better in the years ahead.  The process of managing change is not an easy one. Some academics, like administrators, do become obsolete. Few people knew where late Prime Minister the Right Excellent Errol Barrow was going when he created the Cave Hill Campus in 1963.  But here we are today.  Hopefully, we will be true to his vision by liberating the potential of those in every school, and those not yet in the womb.

The funding model will require from time to time some refinement.  The introduction of the Student Amenities Fee, for example, was controversial but has empowered students at Cave Hill with an investment in new services and facilities ranging from a world class soccer field to comprehensive health care for all. The private sector has invested heavily in campus modernization, and regional and international donors – IADB, USAID, E.U., CIDA, OAS, CDB, IDRC and many others, have funded research and new programmes  We are working with the government in this difficult fiscal time to restructure budgets for operations and capital.  It is a creative and responsible dialogue and we congratulate the Prime Minister, government Ministers and officials, for setting the context and laying out the vision for a new approach to resource investment in the university.

 

 Hilary Beckles,

Pro-Vice Chancellor & Principal

Contact