Professor Clement K Dzidonu, President of the Accra Institute of Technology (AIT) has said the institution aimed at attaining and maintaining international standards of University education.

This, he said, would ensure graduates produced at both the under-graduate, post-graduate and Doctorate degree levels met the required professional skills and capabilities required by industry in the local and international job markets.

Professor Dzidonu told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview, after some members of the Academic and Management staff of the institution interacted with a cross-section of the Media in Sunyani, to introduce the University to the Media for onward information to the general public, particularly residents in the Brong-Ahafo Region.

Prof Dzidonu said though the University was accredited by the National Accreditation Board (NAB), and affiliated to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), it was not looking at the local Universities as their competitors, but rather the internationally acclaimed ones.

Hence, he said, the “AIT is a leading technological University in Ghana, offering top-class engineering, information- technology (IT) and business programmes at its campus in Accra”, adding that it was also offering top-ranged open-university undergraduate and post-graduate programmes in partnership with the Open-University of Malaysia.

Prof. Dzidonu explained that as a technologically-focused university modeled on internationally renowned institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the United States of America (USA) and the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH), which were consistently ranked in the top-five universities in the world, AIT has facilities for supporting internationally bench marked programmes.

He said all AIT students had free unlimited access to all the learning resources required for their programmes, revealing that the institution “is now a leading Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) University in the country with over 250 PhD students”. “AIT hopes to change the current two PhDs per million population in Ghana”, Prof. Dzidonu added.

Dr. Benjamin Aggrey Ntim, Associate Dean, Innovation and Industrial Partnership of AIT, expressed the belief that “the institution is leading the pack in a number of areas” in the country.

He justified that students that transferred from other universities to AIT confessed that “we are different and serious as a number of them gladly agree to start at a lower level”, and “we have the highest grading system in the country because to pass an examination in a given subject, a student must score above 60 per cent ”.

Mr. Dominic Osei Boakye, Registrar of the University, recounted that the Institution which began in 2009 with 60 students, can now boast of over 2,000 students, pursuing various programmes in Engineering, IT and Business. He explained that having more PhD graduates with quality assurance inured to the benefit of the country, because more people would be involved in research into various social-economic problems and challenges of the society.

Mr. Boakye implied that based on the research findings; there would be solutions to the socio-economic challenges to promote the holistic development of the country.

The Registrar disclosed that there are 52 private universities in the country, but only two of them are running programmes in Engineering, explaining it is because investment in that sector of education is very expensive, whilst it is cheaper to operate the businesses and liberal arts courses.