Three Problems of Higher Education in Ghana and How to Fix them

Source: Eric Kumah | Newaccra.com



There is a cartoon of an angry graduate who returned to his former school and demanded to see the dean. The graduate handed over his degree certificate and graduation gowns to the confused dean, and demanded a cash refund of his school fees.
His beef? The degree couldn’t help him find a job three full years after graduating. So he wanted his money back!
In order to make sure that cartoon does not become real in Ghana, we have to fix many things worrying our educational system. Here are solutions to three of them;

Rising Fees

These days, an increasing number of people are comparing getting an education to buying another commodity on the market. For such people, gone are the days where education was a higher value good that was pursued for its own benefit of enlightenment. People now do a cost- benefit analysis that measures the returns on schooling in purely financial terms.

Whilst this line of thinking is flawed, economics can explain the logic. Whenever people have to pay what they judge to be expensive prices, they feel a greater opportunity cost. Consider a private university in Accra that charges the equivalent of 12, 000 GHC (4,000 USD) for a year. Clearly, a struggling parent will think twice before spending that kind of money. But if the same school cost just 40 USD, the thinking twice doesn’t even arise.
A cost analysis of school fees reveals an interesting point.In other countries, schools spend heavily on fancy buildings, extravagant sporting facilities and coaches, entertainment events, and marketing. Comparatively, Ghanaian institutions are not as profligate, at least not yet. But the ones that run foreign programmes, through no fault of theirs, have a big problem because the local currency is weak. Unless incomes increase significantly, people will still feel the pinch.

To solve this problem, anything universities can do to cut fees is welcome. In the short term, schools can start by cutting costs on items that do not have a direct bearing to teaching and learning. Over the longer term, they may explore creative ways of fund raising such as getting donations from successful alumni, going into joint ventures with private companies, commercializing research work etc. With these, they do not have to burden students with strangling fees.
This is also a good time for schools to take a second look at their content and make it more transformational. There is a saying that some people ‘pass through the school, but the school does not pass through them’. Those are the kind of people who will show up one day to demand their refund.

Career Direction

When the oil and gas sector first opened in Ghana, a lot of smart young people went to study programmes in oil and gas management. They graduated with high hopes only to be crushed by a sad reality- yes, there were jobs in that sector, but the vacancies were mostly for technical and engineering roles, not top management jobs.
One of my former lecturers keeps joking about how people can’t find jobs after going to study Master’s degrees in Basket Weaving and PhDs in the physical therapy of how mosquitoes do the Azonto dance. It is sad to see qualified people become misfits because they trained in the wrong subjects.
This begs the question; Who advises our young people on careers? No one
To solve this we need to take career and academic guidance more seriously. In my first year as an undergraduate in Ghana, I had one meeting with my head of department to talk about my progress on the course. I never saw the bearded old man again one-on-one till I graduated. I later learnt that meeting was supposed to be some sort of counselling session.

Our schools need a solid counselling programme that advises young people right from the start of their programmes. Truth is, whether we admit it or not, there is an assumed agreement that when people undergo a tertiary education, they expect their chances of landing a job to increase.

It is time for our universities to face this assumption and actually point our smart brains in the right direction, not just give them general training and dump them into the world.


Graduate Unemployment

Degree inflation is when people need progressively higher qualifications to perform the same jobs they could have done with basic qualifications.
There is a link between graduate unemployment and degree inflation. Decades ago, my parents could use just an A level to get an entry level assistant job in a decent company. Today, bachelor’s and master’s degree holders queue to interview for such jobs.

It is now very rare to see people working in corporate Ghana without a diploma or degree. It doesn’t matter if the job duties they perform actually require those qualifications.
There is a simple explanation for this. The job market is a seller’s market because there are way more job seekers than job creators. So the employers have more than enough to pick from. Months ago when Newaccra.com put out a job ad for 10 candidates, we got more than 400 applicants. In a seller’s market, it is hard to blame employers for demanding higher qualifications.
Let us be clear. The only permanent cure for unemployment among skilled people is entreprenuership.Other measures are simply first aid.
Employers can administer one type of first aid if they ask applicants to show technical skills that prove competence instead of certificates that only prove course completion. For example, eight years ago, a leading telecoms company had a critical sever problem and needed computer programmers. They simply gave each applicant time to come and actually fix the problem. They got their solution and it didn’t come from a computer science PhD holder.