ESTABLISHING a university in a small jurisdiction such as Guernsey would not be economically viable. Industry leaders in Jersey suggested recently that if there was one there, it could one day rival Harvard as one of the world’s leading providers of business training.

But Guernsey Training Agency chief executive Professor Richard Conder doubted that the funding would be available.

Both island centres face the same problems – the amount of money needed and the challenge in prising away students and staff from other well-established universities.

Traditional universities need to fulfil three roles, said Prof. Conder – teaching, research and business enterprise,

‘All universities in the UK now consider that to flourish, they have to be operating in each of these areas.

‘There was a strongly held view in the UK, Europe and the States that a university without research cannot be successful.’

Funding a research unit alone would be costly, without taking into account the cost of infrastructure such as a building and IT.

It was estimated that the annual cost to a university with about 13,000 students is approximately £60m. a year.

Organisations such as the agency work in smaller jurisdictions because they do not employ teaching staff but procure and facilitate courses and degrees.

A review of the agency’s activities last year is included in this month’s Billet d’Etat as part of the GFSC’s 2003 annual report, due to be debated in the States this week.

Prof. Conder said that the agency had had ‘a truly remarkable increase in the number of delegates’ who passed through its door.

The figure rose by more than 50% last year from 2,811 in 2002 to 4,463.

‘With a working population of about 30,000, that is a truly amazing figure,’ he said.

He put the increase down to the range of courses available to people working not just in the finance sector, but also in the retail, IT and commercial sectors.

Among initiatives launched during 2003 were the establishment of two advisory groups and two new postgraduate programmes and the development of strategic and tactical plans for e-business and information technology training.

Representatives from the British Virgin Islands and the Seychelles have already shown an interest in finding out how the agency works.