According to President of Florida Memorial University (FMU) Dr. Roslyn Artis, there is “a good marriage of interest” between the economic needs of The Bahamas and the programmes offered at the university, which she suggested will help to reduce the country’s “brain drain” issue.

Dr. Artis, whose comments came during yesterday’s Love 97 radio talk show Jones & Co., discussed a number of compelling issues including “brain drain” and racial discrimination with a panel of four Bahamian FMU students.

“As we have travelled around these many days and had courtesy visits and spoken to Bahamians, particularly those in leadership, they’ve been clear in their expressions that they would like their students to come back and the kinds of capabilities and capacities those students need to have to best contribute,” Dr. Artis said.

“The finance industry, of course, is critical. Tourism and I don’t mean in service line jobs, I mean in management positions, engineering, computer science and technology. Each of these things is a focus area for Florida Memorial, so we like to think that we have a good marriage of interest,” she added.

“What I’m doing right now is preparing myself to come back home and develop my country’s economy through the experience and knowledge that I’ve gained internationally,” FMU student Duran Saunders said.

He added, “I feel as if the only way we can grow is if we go out and experience other countries and cultures and bring it back home and apply it to our own so that our country can progress.”

Dr. Artis, who noted that the university has been around for some 136 years, said students can look forward to receiving education based on an entrepreneurial standpoint as opposed to preparing themselves to become employees.
She and the students noted the importance of receiving a tertiary education to sustain a developing country.

Dr. Artis urged the listening public to consider FMU as a choice for tertiary education as she lobbied for more Bahamians to apply.

She added that Bahamians have strived in a number of ways on the FMU campus, especially in dominating the electoral process.

Additionally, Dr. Artis outlined a number of racial discrimination issues in America including a number of cases involving police brutality against people of colour.

She noted the importance of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in assisting with eradicating hopelessness and FMU’s mission to put a dent in racial discrimination.

“We (HBCUs) are not only relevant, we are absolutely essential. In the United States, we talk a lot about the race to the top, keeping pace with other countries in terms of economic development and educational attainment. Given the population shift in the demographic where people of colour will comprise the majority very soon, the fact that HBCU’s graduate more than a third of people of colour in the states who have bachelor degrees 40 per cent of the professional and master’s level and over 50 per cent of the physicians and other professional degrees conferred in the states, it is simply mathematically impossible for the education system to keep pace without us,” Dr. Artis said.

“We teach our students to be respectful of one another, to advocate for themselves, to be pro-you is not to be anti-someone else, to be proud of who you are and whose you are, to be able to go out into the world with your head held high knowing that you are fully qualified to make a contribution and that no one has a right to treat you otherwise,” she added.

Dr. Artis hopes to see the quota of Bahamian students increase in the coming years.