Education Minister concerned over shortage of men accessing high education

Education Minister Daryll Matthew is voicing concern over the ‘small number of
men and boys’ capitalizing on the access to higher education offered by the
University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus (UWI FIC).
Matthew made the point in an address during last week’s meeting of the UWI
FIC’s Council, to review the activities of the academic year 2021-22. He said the
university and the society must find creative ways to attract boys and men to
matriculate for higher learning.
“We need to find strategies to attract our young men, not only through the
traditional route to matriculate into the university, but in other ways as well. How
do we attract more men into our Life-long Learning Unit? How do we attract
young professionals to understand that they can upscale themselves even further?
How do we get our young men to embrace education in all its facts? These are the
challenges that I put to the university,” he stated.
Matthew said the ministry of education is committed to working with the
university to address these challenges. He quoted from Principal, Dr Densil
Williams, who spoke of a rise in the level of confidence of people who are
educated at university levels.
“As a population, we can only benefit from the renewed and reinvigorated sense of
confidence from our people. We have always been a strong and confident people
and with a university present and the sort of education, knowledge, skill and
training we will collectively receive as a society, by simply having more persons
higher educated, we will collectively rise; as the sea rises the ships rise as well,” he
stated emphatically.
Figures show that in the Eastern Caribbean only two out of every ten persons
advance to tertiary level education. But the figures also show that women are
graduating at a higher rate across the sub-region than men.