The Graduates: Where does all this “capacity”go?

It is the season of excellence. All over, it is graduates galore - robed, with sashes, hats in the air and hearts on a future full of hope. St. Martin is part of that international community. Dozens of our young students have graduated from universities in the Caribbean, the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Congratulatory messages abound on social media and on the airwaves. From the Prime Minister and other political leaders to family, friends and well-wishers, there is an overflow of pride in the academic achievements of our sons and daughters. I join in the celebration of our young professionals.

But after the dust settles on this familiar and deeply emotional annual ritual, what next? Or better still, where will all these freshly minted graduates go? Where will this pool of qualified young St. Martin graduates be employed?

First, let’s trace their journey from home to the world. They leave the Departure gates of Princess Juliana International Airport after tearful embraces with loved ones. They are some of St. Martin’s brightest young minds. They board flights destined for the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, and the wider Caribbean.

They leave carrying not just their personal dreams packed away in their luggage, but the collective financial and emotional investments of their families, their neighborhoods, and the government that sponsored them. They leave as teenagers, ready to conquer the world. They surely don’t see their Departure gate as the Gate of no Return

It becomes for some of them.

Fast forward three to five years. In grand auditoriums across Europe and North America, these same young sons and daughters of the soil walk across prestigious stages in caps and gowns. They graduate with distinction, holding degrees in various disciplines including hospitality management, and medicine.

We have reportedly just had our first ever ophthalmologist.

Yet, back home in Great Bay, the daily headlines tell a starkly different, incredibly frustrating story: government departments are crippled by a chronic "lack of capacity," which has become everyone ‘s favorite sing-song.

Local businesses also complain about a severe shortage of skilled labor, and critical policy reforms are stalled because there are simply "not enough qualified hands on deck."

This paradox is the defining crisis of the island’s modern development. As a territory, we are successfully producing world-class professionals on a global stage, yet our local institutions are structurally starving for expertise. We find ourselves trapped in a vicious cycle where millions of dollars are spent to export our finest intellectual capital, while our domestic infrastructure relies on expensive foreign consultants to perform basic functions. That is what is popularly called the “brain drain.”

To chart a sustainable path forward, we must look beyond the surface of this issue. We must examine the hard statistics of our educational pipeline, the cold economic realities waiting for these graduates, the frequently ignored psychological trauma of repatriation, and the radical policy shifts required to bring our children back home.

A Disconnected Pipeline

In order to fully grasp the scale of this societal mismatch, one only needs to look directly at the numbers. Data from the Division of Study Financing indicates that the government of St. Maarten finances and supports between 100 to 150 NEW students annually to pursue higher education abroad. When we factor in independent students and those receiving partial grants, the numbers increase. Cumulatively, at any given time, we can conservatively estimate that over 250 St. Maarten students are scattered across universities all over the globe.

When graduation season peaks between May and September, some 70 to 90 of our young professionals enter the global workforce annually with bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in their hands. From a purely mathematical standpoint, the pipeline is thriving. If even half of these graduates returned home every year, the island's public and private sectors would receive a massive infusion of up to 225 highly qualified professionals over a five-year period.

Instead, government ministries and corporate boards continually issue desperate tenders for external help. We spend valuable public funds to hire international firms to draft our laws, manage our post-hurricane infrastructure projects, and consult on critical policies. However, the “capacity” we claim to lack actually exists—it just exists in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, the UK, Miami, New York and even in Australia rather than in the government administration building in Great Bay. Obviously then, the pipeline isn't broken; it is simply pumping our greatest resource - our young professionals- straight into the economies of developed nations.

After Graduation, What?

To understand why our graduates choose to build lives abroad rather than returning to the shores where they were raised, we must honestly examine what actually awaits them after graduating. For a returning St. Martin graduate, the homecoming is often met with rigid systemic walls rather than open, welcoming arms.

The Bureaucratic Maze of Local Employment

Many graduates who actively want to return home are immediately demoralized by a sluggish, archaic public sector hiring process. It often takes a long time for an application to be processed by government, requiring multiple signatures from department heads, secretary-generals, before ultimately a national decree (landsbesluit) is issued. A young professional burdened with the immediate, real-world pressures of entering adulthood cannot afford to sit idle and unemployed for months on end while the bureaucratic wheels slowly turn.

The Compensation Mismatch

While in many cases, patriotism and love for the island are strong, economic survival is a stronger motivator. The starting salaries offered on the island —particularly within the civil service structure under the Landsverordening Materieel Ambtenarenrecht (LMA)— are frequently completely uncompetitive when compared to the European or American markets.

Add to this the island’s extraordinarily high cost of living, skyrocketing utility rates, and a severe lack of affordable, independent housing, an entry-level salary at home can feel less like a career starter and more like an economic regression.

Why can’t we, for example, offer them a similar package like the ones the “foreign experts” who may, in fact, have been their classmates at the university get? Because, if we do the math properly, it most likely would turn out to be cheaper.

Professional Stagnation and "Gatekeeping"

Young returning professionals often voice immense frustration regarding a lack of mentorship and upward mobility. They enter local institutions full of modern ideas, automated workflows, and innovative, data-driven solutions, only to be met with the demoralizing phrase: "This is the way we’ve always done it." Furthermore, a rigid culture of professional gatekeeping sometimes views returning academics as threats to established hierarchies rather than vital assets, effectively stifling their enthusiasm and driving them right back to the airport.

Reverse Culture Shock and Psychological Isolation

While the structural and financial hurdles of returning home are often analyzed, the deeply personal, psychological toll of repatriation is almost entirely ignored by policymakers. As a society, we often naively assume that coming home to a beautiful tropical island is an easy, joyful transition. In reality, for many young professionals, it is a jarring, confusing psychological disruption known as "reverse culture shock."

Going away changes one’s internal chemistry. You spend your most formative years adapting to an environment of efficient public transit, absolute personal independence, and large-scale cultural diversity. Coming back home means trying to squeeze yourself back into a box that simply no longer fits who you have become.

When a student leaves St. Maarten at 18 years old, they form their adult identity, their coping mechanisms, and their core worldview in a completely foreign environment which can be sometimes culturally hostile. They become accustomed to systems that work seamlessly—from fast internet networks and automated digital banking to reliable 24/7 electricity, robust public infrastructure, and accessible mental health support networks. Returning to a landscape where basic utility infrastructure can be challenging and routine bureaucratic processes still require physical lines and paper forms creates an immediate, daily friction that quickly wears down mental resilience.

Beyond the systemic adjustments, a profound emotional isolation frequently sets in. This is manifested as follows:

The Loss of the "Third Place"

In larger university cities, youth culture thrives in diverse public spaces, parks, museum districts, and accessible, low-cost social hubs. In St. Maarten, social life is heavily commercialized and tourism-driven, centered mostly around expensive restaurants and nightlife, leaving very few spaces for creative, non-consumerist expression or intellectual gathering.

The Weight of Hyper-Surveillance: Moving from the relative anonymity of a major global city back to a tight-knit, small-island community where "everybody knows everybody" can feel incredibly claustrophobic. The sudden, total loss of privacy and the constant weight of community and familial expectations place an unspoken emotional burden on our returning youth.

The "Imposter" Feeling at Home: Many graduates also report feeling like strangers in their own land. They are caught in a painful cultural limbo—deemed "too Europeanized," "too Americanized," or "too educated" by many of us, yet they fiercely identify as proud St. Martíners who want nothing more than to contribute to their island.

When we look at a young professional who packs up and leaves the island a second time after only a couple of years of trying to make it work at home, it is rarely just about the money. Often, it is because the psychological weight of isolation, the lack of a supportive, forward-thinking peer network, and the feeling of cultural alienation became too heavy to bear alone.

Flipping the Script: How to Bridge the Capacity Gap

If the island is to successfully solve its enduring capacity crisis, our leadership must stop treating study financing as a charitable educational grant and start treating it as a strategic, high-stakes workforce pipeline. We cannot continue to pour millions of dollars into creating global scholars without building the domestic infrastructure necessary to catch them when they land.

Fixing this structural failure requires a deliberate, multi-pronged approach.

For me, this should include facilitating internship programs for our students- both those studying abroad and at home. This will require that we keep constant track of their progress and a dynamic public-private-partnership that makes placement easier for the interns.

An Autonomous "Fast-Track" Repatriation Program: Similarly, government must establish a streamlined recruitment pipeline specifically for returning graduates. This program should bypass standard, months-long bureaucratic delays to place qualified returning scholars into critical, capacity-deficient roles within 60 days of their graduation.

Enforced Bonding Paired with Real Incentives: While government study financing loans carry mandatory bonding clauses that require students to work for the territory, enforcement must be paired with attractive incentives rather than penalties. Implementing progressive tax breaks for the first three to five years after returning home, housing assistance allowances, and competitive starting packages can effectively bridge the financial gap between St. Martin and the developed countries where they studied.

Institutional Modernization: Local entities, both public and private, must be willing to modernize. Embracing digital tools, remote-work flexibility, and the fresh, innovative perspectives that these students spend years studying is the only way to keep them engaged and prevent immediate professional burnout.

Socio-Emotional Landing Pads: We must develop professional associations and networking hubs specifically designed to integrate returning graduates, providing them with mentorship, peer support, and a collective voice to counter the effects of reverse culture shock.

The Choice Before Us

St. Maarten stands at a critical developmental crossroads. We can no longer afford to remain an island that proudly boasts of its children's global academic achievements while simultaneously crying about “lack of capacity” at home. Every empty desk in our government offices, every stalled legislative reform, and every exorbitant consultant invoice we pay is a stark reminder of a graduate we failed to bring back home to serve their island.

Our students are performing well at universities worldwide, proving their mettle against the best and brightest the world has to offer. It is now the urgent, historical responsibility of our leaders in the business and public sectors to build a society that is worthy of their return—proving to our youth that their hard-earned expertise is not just abstractly welcomed at home, but absolutely vital to our collective survival and eventual independence.

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