The government should rethink the current phenomenon of establishing new universities and the duplication of higher education programmes and curricula as a way of expanding tertiary education, but rather make these programmes responsive to graduate unemployment, skill gaps and national development, Christine Adu-Yeboah, the director of the Institute of Education of the University of Cape Coast, has said.
Delivering a paper, ‘Expansion of public universities and the implications for equitable access, quality and sustainability’, as part of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences’ policy dialogue on education, Adu-Yeboah said: “One way of doing this is to merge programmes being run by different institutions in the same district or region.”
This is to avoid a situation in which a technical university and a comprehensive public university both run technical or engineering programmes despite resource constraints, especially if both have only a few students.
In the face of inadequate resources available to the government to support the expansion of university education in underdeveloped regions, it would be appropriate to use public-private partnerships, as well as promote the involvement of civil society and other identifiable organisations, to expand tertiary institutions.
If the government involved these groups, it could help “bridge the gap between developed and underdeveloped regions and their institutions, particularly, basic or secondary schools whose students hardly meet the keenly competitive admission requirements in universities, to achieve the agenda of ‘no region left behind’ ”, said Adu-Yeboah at the gathering on 19 March.
Her comments come after President Nana Dankwa Akufo-Addo said in his State of the Nation address to parliament on 27 February that the government has decided to establish four new universities and expand facilities in existing ones following an increase in the number of students who qualify to enter universities as a result of Ghana’s free senior high school policy.
Curriculum reform
Adu-Yeboah said there was an urgent need to reform the higher education curricula to take into consideration “the under-subscription of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programmes in favour of humanities, and increasing the admission quotas for STEM applicants to lead a nation that seeks transformation through industrialisation to meet industry needs and also respond to graduate unemployment”.
“To complement [the] government’s efforts, higher education institutions need to develop innovative strategies, such as opening up entrepreneurial ventures … to fulfil their social responsibilities through recruitment of indigenes and partnering with industry for mutual benefits that will expand the income base of universities to improve the quality of teaching and learning,” Adu-Yeboah added.
Touching on what she described as the “over-commercialisation of university education”, she said there was the need to “ensure equitable access to very competitive programmes by the economically disadvantaged”, adding that, “there may be the need to monitor the regulatory regime on university fee systems to control the likely abuse of fee-paying and other non-regular programmes”.
“State funding agencies providing financial intermediations and support to students need to be more tilted towards identifying and sponsoring very needy people, even if it is through non-regular programmes,” Adu-Yeboah said.
She mentioned that funding agencies could intensify their work in the public education sector in deprived areas by going to less endowed senior high schools to educate students as well as parents on how to access these facilities.
Sustainable higher education
Adu-Yeboah said that, for universities to become more relevant to society, they need to be at the forefront of the national development drive and that will call for a reorientation and changes in the operations of their systems.
These must include the need to critically consider the process of implementing the government’s higher education sector expansion agenda with the development of a broad framework to ensure sustainable, equitable access and the successful completion of qualifications by students generally and minority groups particularly, including socially disadvantaged students, females and persons with disabilities.
“This framework could adopt strategies that may include identifying less endowed regions or secondary schools for targeted academic and-or social interventions and mentoring in achieving corporate social responsibilities and, thereby, attracting prospective applicants,” she said.
Adu-Yeboah said, to attain sustainability and affordable university education at the same time, “it is becoming obvious, as shown in the literature, that education financing is the responsibility of both the state (including institutions, themselves,) and beneficiaries”.
Accordingly, she said, “the bold step must be taken as a nation to chart that path while maintaining the balance between sustainability and affordability.
“For this reason, there is a need to review universities’ cost-sharing arrangements in the face of expansions to address the ever-increasing cost of university education (including residential accommodation and utility bills, lecture halls, offices) to make other actors and beneficiaries of university education more accountable for the use of higher education facilities.”
Adu-Yeboah said the discourse on achieving transformational and sustainable university education should not lose focus on new ways of delivering education and transferring knowledge, including extending public university education to more people, particularly the under-served segments of society.
“This is something that has been engaged in critically in a series of studies and workshops by the United Nations Higher Education Sustainability Initiative, as well as in recent reports on achieving goal four of the Sustainable Development Goals, and Ghana cannot isolate itself from that conversation and path,” she added.
