CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME
Sep 14, 2016 , http://www.kaieteurnewsonline....ty-begins-at-home-4/
At least for the next three years, Guyanese law students can breathe a little easier knowing that 25 places are guaranteed to them for admission to the law programme of the University of the West Indies.
The top 25 law students will make it to UWI but for the remainder of the class there is uncertainty about their future. The students, recognizing this fact, are now calling for an abolition of the quota system. They want automatic admission into UWI’s law programme.
But why should UWI consent to this demand.
The University of Guyana is not part of the UWI family. So is UWI not being generous enough to set aside 25 places each year for Guyanese students? Apart from this quota, the Guyanese students can apply directly to UWI to gain admission. This means that more than twenty-five students can and are usually admitted each year to the law programme at Hugh Wooding.
The arrangement will still leave some graduates of the law programme offered by the University of Guyana out in the cold. They will simply not be able to gain admission even with the quota system in place. This leaves them hanging. Some will continue to have a UG law degree but cannot move forward because they may never be able to complete the LEC at UWI.
The long term solution is for UG to have its own law school which is recognized around the Caribbean for admission to the Bar. But UG is not that ambitious at this stage.
Charity must begin at home. The law programme at the University of Guyana has its problems. While Guyanese students are complaining about the quota system, there is a deafening silence about the fact that there is also a quota locally as to how many students can gain admission to the law degree programme at the University of Guyana. A number of students who applied and who met the entry requirements could not be admitted because there is a limit to the number of places locally.
The same thing happens for the medical programme. A number of students who applied were not able to gain admission to the UG medical degree because the school can only hold so much. We are disenfranchising our own students and then turning around and complaining about UWI limiting the number of law students to 25.
The Guyana government is going to spend millions of dollars each year to subsidize the tuition of law students, most of whom when they graduate will earn millions of dollars per month, judging from the comment of one lawyer who justified a pay rise on the grounds that what a Minister previously earned is what he paid junior counsel in his law firm.
Not everyone can afford the steep tuition fees at Hugh Wooding, Cave Hill and Mona. So it is nice for the government to help the students who are going to study there and graduate as lawyers. But what about the many secondary school graduates who have the requisite qualifications and would like to sign up for the law degree programme at the University of Guyana?
Should the government not also try to ensure that they too can have a chance to become lawyers by expanding the law school at UG? Is Guyana not in need of more doctors? And should the medical programme not be expanded to ensure that more students can be admitted?
We should be helping our 25 law students who will gain admission under the quota system at UWI. But we should also be helping UG to admit more law students to its programme.
The more students that are admitted, however, the greater will be the complaints about the quota system at UWI. The long-term solution is for UG to aim for its own LEC so that our students do not have the annual competition for the limited places at UWI. The best 25 go forward. What happens to the rest?
