Consummate educationist and Chairperson of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Prof. Stephen Adei has expressed outrage at what he describes as “discrimination” against private university graduates in Ghana.

According to him, “those who have trained themselves should not be punished for not burdening the state” bemoaning the lack of automatic employment for graduates from the private institutions as opposed to their counterparts who were trained at the expense of the state.

Prof. Adei was the Guest Speaker at the 11th Congregation of the Garden City University College in the Ashanti region on Saturday, July 27, 2019, where hundreds of students graduated with degrees and diplomas ranging from Health Sciences, Business Studies and Applied Sciences.

Speaking on the theme, “The 21st Century Innovator: Challenges and Prospects”, Prof. Adei applauded the private sector for offering the “cheapest education in Ghana” and challenged the state to ” include the private sector in its thinking of support, so that the support is not because it is a private or a public, but because a Ghanaian student is being educated”.

In so doing, he said students would have the “same access to facilities like every other student”.

“Sometimes the discrimination against private universities’ graduates makes me very angry; because in the case of nurses, all of them take the same examinations and all are judged by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, they all pass the same examination and yet if you are in the public sector you are supposed to be guaranteed employment and if you don’t get employment, they go and wave a flag and private university nurses are left on their own”, he said.

Prof. Stephen Adei cautioned the state not to look down on private universities but take a cue from the fact that at the basic education level, “private schools are twice better than the state, so much so that, even teachers in the public schools send their children to private schools; an indictment of the bad jobs they are doing in the public sector, for I always will fight them until they change”.

He suggested that “the time has come for us to have the reverse; those who have trained themselves should not be punished for not burdening the state”.

The Garden City University College (GCUC), located in the Kwabre East Municipality of the Ashanti region, boasts a mission of providing a centre of excellence in teaching, learning and research with distinctive scholarship and competence, by blending business, information technology, education, social sciences and health sciences to develop innovators in the industrial and other socio-economic sectors in Ghana and the international community.