The Tertiary Education System in Jamaica has been an evolving one. It has grown in response to various socio-historic stimuli, and continues to evolve even today. In many instances the evolving institutions have so re-interpreted their original mission in the face of new imperatives of subsequent generations as to be significantly different from the institutions initially conceived.

The difficulty with this evolutionary process, however, is that the resulting, very subtle changes in the mode of delivery, and the deliverables of some of these institutions create instances of disjuncture between the players in the various sectors of the tertiary landscape. Such disjuncture highlights, from one perspective, the need for a wholesale, system-wide revision and re-structuring of the business processes of, and the relationships existing between the various players in the tertiary education sector. This revision, I contend, must lead to a fully articulated system, with the in-built servo-mechanisms which will allow it to auto-adjust with the eventuality of future evolutionary movements.

The paper seeks to examine aspects of the socio-historical context of the relationship between various players in the tertiary education sector, the presence of unruly pockets of growth which have gone unheeded by other sub-sectors of the tertiary community, and to describe, to some extent, the disconnect and the resulting pressures which have resulted from the lop-sided evolution within the system. It then focuses on the need for the establishment of a fully articulated system in order to maximize the possible benefits which can accrue from the expenditure of the country’s scarce resources, and underscores some considerations which must be addressed on the way to re-organising the public tertiary education sector into a fully integrated system.