We Know How to Find Champions

Every year the National Stadium fills for Champs, the schools athletics championships that have run since 1910, and for a few days a country of fewer than three million people runs the most effective talent search in world athletics.

No parish is left behind. A girl from a country school in St Elizabeth, a boy from a small district in Trelawny, a child whose family has no tangible assets, can walk onto that track and be seen. Coaches watch. Potential evaluated and scholarships follow. Somewhere in the stands, someone writes a name down.

That is not luck. That is infrastructure. Jamaica decided generations ago that athletic ability would be found wherever it lived on the island, and that greatness should never be limited by circumstance. World records followed, but only because the scouting came first.

We have not built the same systems for intellect. Jamaica built one of the finest talent identification systems in world sport. We have never built the equivalent for the classroom.

Every so often a parent goes public with an appeal to fund their child's education. Crowdfunding accounts are launched. A parent sits in front of a camera. The child in question has done everything that was asked. Worked hard every year, at every level, and then the family has arrived at a number they cannot reach. The appeals circulate for a few days, empathetic family and strangers send what they can, and the story disappears. Then another one gets circulated.

It is worth understanding exactly where that number comes from, because most Jamaicans, including many who have been to university, have never seen the arithmetic laid out.

In practical terms, for the 2025/2026 academic year at Mona, medicine looks like this. A sponsored Jamaican student pursuing the MBBS pays J$784,901 for the year. A student from the same country, sitting in the same lecture theatre, who does not hold sponsored status pays J$3,042,077.

That is a life altering difference. Most Jamaican students never encounter this, and that is precisely the problem. It stays invisible until the day it comes crashing down on them, and by then they are already enrolled, already committed, already three years into a five year programme.

For context, the annual sponsored rate for most arts, science and social sciences degrees at Mona is J$346,533. There is a miscellaneous fee of J$45,577 that applies to everyone regardless of programme, and it applies before anybody has bought a textbook, paid rent, or eaten.

The Students' Loan Bureau has been lending since 1970. It receives more than ten thousand applications a year and approves close to all of them. Its Targeted Loan carries no repayment until studies are complete. Its Pay As You Study (PAYS) facility lends up to J$1 million per academic year, but it is available only where the borrower is employed and repayment begins immediately by salary deduction, which in practice means a working parent or relative borrowing on the student's behalf. Combined, the two cannot exceed J$2 million in any academic year. At Mona, students on the PATH programme and wards of the state automatically receive a Grant in Aid of J$60,000 alongside their loan.

The Jamaica Values and Attitudes Programme pays 30 per cent of a student's tuition, capped at J$350,000, in exchange for two hundred hours of voluntary public service, with the Students' Loan Bureau lending the remaining 70 per cent. It is a genuinely fine idea, and thousands of students have used it.

Look at those two numbers beside the fee schedule, though, and the difficulty becomes plain. JAMVAT's J$350,000 ceiling covers essentially the whole of a J$346,533 arts degree. Set against the non-sponsored MBBS rate, it covers about a ninth. The support was designed around the average programme. It was never scaled to the top of the range, and medicine, dentistry and law sit at the top of the range.

There is a second difficulty, quieter and rarely discussed beyond the campus. At Mona, a student must be registered and financially cleared to sit final assessments. A memorandum issued to all students by the Campus Registrar in April 2026, implementing regulations in effect since July 2025, sets out what that means: all prior semester fees, current miscellaneous fees and the semester's tuition paid in full, or an approved arrangement made with the Bursary.

The University does provide routes through, and this should be said plainly. Instalment plans are available, and students facing difficulty are urged to approach the Bursary directly with a proposal for settling what they owe.

But the same memorandum sets out what follows when clearance does not come in time. A student is admitted to assessments only from the point at which they become financially cleared, and no consideration is given for work missed in the meantime. They must re-register for the course when it is next offered, and pay for it again.

So a late payment does not cost a student an examination. It costs them the course, the semester, and a second set of fees for teaching they have already sat through.

And there is the difficulty the hardship clause cannot reach. A student whose loan disbursement is late through no fault of their own has nothing to propose to a bursary.

We do not know how many students this has affected. Nobody publishes that figure. But if one student did the work and was kept from the room, that is one too many.

A World Bank assessment cited by the American Foundation for the University of the West Indies found that the Caribbean has the lowest higher education enrolment rate in the hemisphere, below 25 per cent, against roughly 60 per cent in North America and about 52 per cent in Latin America. Local analysts have long estimated that no more than a fifth of Jamaicans hold any post secondary qualification at all.

The real measure is not the individual heartbreak, though the heartbreak is real, but the compounding national cost of the doctors, engineers, agronomists and researchers who were fully capable and simply never got in the room.

The American Foundation for the University of the West Indies is a New York based charity that has been funding Caribbean students for nearly three decades. Its annual gala, held for the twenty ninth time this year, supports roughly fifty UWI students annually. Over the past ten years the foundation has granted close to 650 tuition scholarships and bursaries, alongside some US$8.3 million in books, computers, furnishings and medical equipment sent to campuses across the region.

The UWI Toronto Gala funds scholarships from Canada. Alumni chapters in New York, Florida and Washington DC have run their own campaigns, including one that placed fifty laptops directly into the hands of Mona students who had none. Past students associations attached to Jamaican high schools quietly send money home every year, often without ever announcing it.

This is not charity at a distance. These are Jamaicans who emigrated but never stopped paying attention to the needs of the island.

We know how to do this. We do it every March at the National Stadium, with a system so good the rest of the world studies it. Jamaica built that.

So the question is not whether we are capable of building such a thing. It is whether we are willing to build it twice.

Some of that work has already begun, and it began abroad. Every fund named in this article was built by people who left and kept paying attention. If you belong to a past students association, an alumni chapter, or a church that quietly sends money home each year, you are already part of the machinery. The rest of us can join it, and joining costs less than most of us spend on a barrel.

The child who needs it now is not on a track. They are waiting to sit an examination they may not be permitted to enter, in a country that has already decided, in one arena at least, that where you were born will not determine how far you are allowed to run.