The last issue of The Sunday Times carried an article on the stipends that are paid out of public funds to young people pursuing further studies after years of compulsory schooling.
It was based on an interview with the Rector of the University and also gave the opinions of Evarist Bartolo, Edward Scicluna and two others who led the student protests in 1997 when the Labour government of the time had wanted to change the stipends system.
There were also the views of an unnamed Ministry of Finance spokesman and of Karl Agius, a former president of the KSU.
Frankly the article seemed to have had one objective – that of informing readers that the current policy of the Labour Party on stipends has changed from the days when Alfred Sant was Prime Minister, naturally attempting to kill a potential negative issue for the Opposition.
However, that objective is irrelevant to me as it says more about the writer of the feature than the merit of the debate. Is the current stipends system sustainable, since the stipends bill is expected to reach €30 million by 2020?
The stipends issue is not a new one. It owes its origin to the end of the 1960s, when one had to pay to read for a University degree.
The Nationalist Party of the day had taken the decision in 1970 to remove these fees. However, there still remained the issue that to attend University entailed a certain cost (for some families it meant lost income as well) that was very significant.
The reality at the time was that we had several segments of the population who missed out on going to University because the cost was too high for them to afford it or because persons did not want to miss out on the few job opportunities there were, or because children of owners of family businesses were told that it was useless going to University since they had a place ready for them in the business.
Added to this was the very limited choice of courses.
In the mid-1970s, the University students had called for the introduction of grants (another name for stipends); a call that had been derided by the government of the time.
A few years later, the government introduced the (in)famous student-worker scheme, which was a way of giving students some form of financial assistance.
However, the system was flawed in its concept and so the number of persons moving into tertiary education did not increase significantly.
By the mid-1980s we had record unemployment and yet the business sector was complaining that it could not find persons for middle management positions, engineers to work in industry, technicians, etc.
The stipends system was introduced by the Nationalist government elected in 1987. It was welcomed by all as it was accompanied by a clear policy to expand post-secondary education.
To me here lies the significance of the stipends system.
It is not a system for university students but a system for all students attending post-secondary education. We needed to expand post-secondary education from both a supply and a demand perspective.
Therefore the range of courses was expanded, an alternative sixth form was created (higher secondary school) and Mcast was set up.
From the demand side, an increasing number of young persons chose to continue with their studies, and as a result, the platform of skills of the Maltese workforce improved steadily.
So I would like to turn the question posed by the title of this week’s contribution into another one – can we afford not to have the stipends system?
What the country needs is not a grudging acceptance of the stipends system but a belief that the stipends system was a contributing factor to improving the skills and qualifications of the Maltese workforce that has in turn contributed to the strong economic performance of the last 20 years.
The stipends system has produced not only more University graduates but also persons with IT, technical and business qualifications, persons who have gone through sixth form education, persons who needed to be given a second chance.
Would we have achieved this without a stipends system? Certainly not.