31st July 2010
Why invest in The University of the West Indies
By Sir George Alleyne

An old friend of mine, half in jest, told me once that there are two circumstances in which one should be extraordinarily cautious about something that moves. One is if it appears on your plate in a restaurant. The other is if it is proposed to you as a possibility for investment. He said that the old adage still holds true that the best investment is in things that do not move or are not going to disappear—things that have some permanence. Land has always been a good investment, because there is a finite amount of it and it does not disappear. But of course that was before we began to appreciate the possible sequelae of global warming.
I would claim a similar constancy and permanence for The University of the West Indies. It is highly unlikely to disappear. It has survived some of the most fractious and tendentious periods of West Indian history, has adjusted to the financial and political realities of the region and has continued to grow and demonstrate its usefulness and relevance to the Caribbean. It has been and continues to be a good investment for its main stakeholders.
The first group of interested stakeholders must be the alumni who if for no other reason have self interest as a motive for investing in their alma mater. No one wishes to be a graduate of an institution in decline. No one wishes the currency of the qualifications one got from one’s university to be debased. Part of the cachet of the old traditional universities is that they have continued even in the face of adversity and can continue to trot out a line of alumni who have been successful and productive in many fields. But I would claim that for our sixty-one years we have not done badly. As I have mentioned elsewhere as a possible metric it took three hundred years for Oxford to produce 25 Prime Ministers and Cambridge 13. In our first 60 years we have produced 11. But every alumnus should feel proud not only of the Pelican Prime Ministers, but also because UWI has been the major source of the human capital responsible for stitching together much of the fabric of Caribbean society. I am amazed at the niches our graduates have created for themselves. I know of no butchers, bakers or candlestick makers, but I do know of bartenders, chicken farmers, priests and poets.
Of course UWI cannot claim to be the sole source of the essential Caribbean human capital, but it can claim with justification that it is the main source of the knowledge production that emerging societies need, especially when they have not been blessed with large land masses or vast reserves of mineral resources. The story of the emerging market economies is one of enhanced knowledge capacity of the human workforce, innovation and application of technology. Of course they are all interrelated.
I was taken by a recent comment of a Cambridge graduate on being solicited for support for his University. He made the point that his alma mater had to come up with a good moral argument if it wished to persuade him to contribute, and that giving to any cause in the face of so many competing demands was a matter of emotion rather than logic. The tradition of alumni contributing to or investing in their Universities is relatively young in Britain as opposed to the United States and to some extent UWI “suffers” from the relics of the British tradition, but that is being corrected rapidly and there are more and more structured approaches to invite alumni to contribute to the alma mater. I would posit a moral argument in terms of those who were fortunate to benefit from higher education having a responsibility to ensure that future generations had as good a chance as they had and this is particularly relevant in societies such as ours. There is in addition, the aspect of self interest which I mentioned above.
But the public in general also has a stake in investing in the University. There is good evidence, and a recent study from Australia emphasized it, that public investment in universities leads to increases in skills, productivity and eventually an increase in GDP. The case was being made for an increase in university funding in the face of the economic crisis and it was shown that the rate of return on the proposed investment was estimated at between 14 and 15 percent which was about double the rate of return typically used to judge whether a proposed public policy was or was not sound. There have been studies in the Caribbean which show similar results. The case for investing in universities has the same merit as that adduced for investing in national infrastructure. The knowledge infrastructure is as important as the physical infrastructure and the impact of deterioration in either is felt usually in the long term. The returns to the investment are those to society in general but include to some degree the returns to the individuals for whom higher education represents a private good.