Rejoinder: The State of Ghana's University Student

Ghana, as a developing nation and an emerging strong democracy in Africa, we as a people, have the challenge of reinforcing the nation's human and institutional capabilities, so that all sectors, firms and individuals can acquire, adapt, and use knowledge effectively in order for us to capture the 21st century, to lift ourselves out of poverty, illiteracy, disease and filth.

It is from the foregoing perspective that this writer finds Wonder Madilo's article, published on Ghanaweb, Wednesday, 15th April, 2009 and myjoyonline, Tuesday 21st April, 2009, very interesting and timely, in spite of the obvious inaccuracies and distortions.

Unless we ensure that best practices are adhered to in our educational institutions, our graduates will be ill-prepared to compete. We ignore, to our peril, best practices like small class sizes, insisting on qualified faculty who keep themselves current; good faculty-student ratio; adequate facilities that will enhance teaching, learning, and research; curricular that is constantly updated, taking into consideration the needs of industry and the knowledge revolution; co-ordinated industrial attachment, among others. Our focus should be churning out graduates who can compete both locally and in the global arena. Additionally, we should inculcate into our students national consciousness, strong sense of patriotism, and self-confidence so that we will raise graduates and future leaders who are passionate regarding our national developmental challenges; poverty, filth, illiteracy, and disease.

We should avoid training graduates who will be rejected in their first round of job interview due, inter alia, to poor communication, lack of confidence, inadequate presentation skills, life skills, leadership skills, and expertise in their respective fields of specialisation. We should aim at equipping our graduates with the right aptitude and the functional skills required to make them successful in their first job. Students themselves have a major role to play in this regard. They must be willing to make use of the facilities available in their respective institutions. They should not only concentrate on passing exams. In-depth learning must be their aim.

All stakeholders need to be involved in addressing our challenges. Heads and management of our tertiary educational institutions, students, parents, the central government, and other agencies would all have to be involved in ensuring adequate training for our graduates. Thank God that there are some institutions currently operating in our country which have in operation, the best practices outlined above. Others are also working towards this end. Regent University College of Science and Technology for instance, insists on small class sizes. The average class size gravitates between 20 and 30 students. In some of the common courses where the class number goes beyond 50, it is a policy that the class be divided. We do not think our students should be deficient in any way from their colleagues who study in other institutions outside our continent. We, because of this, put a lot of emphasis on quality teaching and the provision of excellent facilities. We encourage effective lecturer-student interactions. We do not allow lecturers to dictate notes to their students in our class rooms. All class notes are expected to be uploaded in advance on our eCampus. Our labs and learning resource centres are consistently upgraded.

To make our students industry-ready, we use the services of Demonstrators. These are experienced, industry-compliant specialists who do not possess the qualifications required for them to function as lecturers but nonetheless, possess the skills and experience which most of the qualified lecturers with postgraduate degrees do not often have. We make supervised industrial attachment an integral part of the training of our students. To this end, all students are required to keep what has become known as “The Green Book,” which documents the practical experiences of the student through the duration of their industrial training and their stay at the University College. The students are also required to write and submit their Student Autobiography. All these are required before graduation. The Autobiography requires the student to articulate his or her past, present, and future life/experiences and expectations. The future aspect requires the student to prepare a personal strategic plan for the next five years. All courses at Regent-Ghana are taught by at least M.Sc. holders, and a good number of courses and programmes are taught by Ph.D. holders, including those from international institutions.

We ensure that all prospective graduates are taken through rigorous interviews by a panel of the Academic Board before they are recommended for graduation. The panel evaluates and performs pre-graduation assessment in areas such as keyboarding, the mastery of MS Office, especially Microsoft Word and Power Point presentation skills; communication skills, domain expertise, leadership skills, and current affairs. The panel's task is intended to produce quality and deserving classification for each prospective graduate by aligning the students' GPA or CWA into a conferrable graduation class.

Most of our students who go on industrial attachment are retained. Ecobank is one of such places where our students have gone on attachment and have been retained. Most of our students are also able to find jobs before the completion of their studies. To make their experiences from attachments practical, Regent University has integrated computer science/information communication technology, or aspects thereof, into all of our programmes. This approach also bolsters the competitiveness of Regent-Ghana graduates in the global arena. We realise information technology, underscored by computing sciences, is currently the fastest growing area of the sciences. Because of this, new technology-enabled industries and products are constantly cropping up. Most of the local lecturers who completed their post graduate studies still found themselves wanting in 'computing skills' required in some of the newest areas of education and/or industry. Subjects like VB.NET (Visual Basic.Net), Internet/Web Programming, C# programming, and Linux/Unix operating system are critical tools required for programming and database management in industry today.

Similar requirements apply to the practical part of computer hardware and architecture. Since these are not traditionally taught in most of our universities for obvious reasons, most computer science graduates are not exposed to them; they acquire their degrees before going out to learn these things to enable them become industry-compliant. Because of Regent's philosophy of integrating theory with practice, we sometimes use first degree holders as Demonstrators to teach these rare subjects. In some cases, we employ some professors from overseas institutions to teach them for us. Mr Wonder Madilo would have helped himself and his readers, if he had taken the pains to talk to some officers of the Regent University for an accurate picture when he wrote that “The Chairperson of a panel from National Accreditation Board on a visit to Regent University College of Science and Technology in January 2007 declared that “an observation has been made that these days some of the private universities have resorted to the use of first degree holders in teaching a full course in some of the computer science courses which they [sic: they - some of the private institutions, and certainly not at Regent University] run” (page 3f. ).

The National Accreditation Board, as a regulatory agency, is doing its best in ensuring that quality becomes the hallmark of our institutions. Though admittedly, just like any other institution, there is still room for improvement; it is, however, inaccurate for Mr Madilo, without providing any evidence, to over-generalise and conclude that “Private universities are springing up daily without accreditation and government look on without any punitive action” (page 2). Mr. Madilo's desire to see sanity in our tertiary institutions will make better meaning if he is able to submit the names of those private universities in the country (or at lease some of them) who are operating without accreditation. Assuming Mr Madilo is indeed a student activist at GIMPA, as he claims in his paper, he will be more credible if he is able to apply rigour to his research efforts and also substantiate his allegations with hard facts.

On filth, one can say that Mr Madilo is obviously raising an important concern, though he is again over-generalising about its endemic proportions at our country's university campuses. In any case filth in our nation is one of the challenges we will all have to tackle collectively. We have the capacity to make it happen! Though the present writer is not sure of the particular institutions where filth has become an endemic problem, as Madilo seems to suggest, the collective leadership of our academic institutions have the responsibility to ensure that our campuses are safe, conducive, and comfortable for academic training.

What is lacking is leadership in this direction both nationally and locally. It is easier for most of us to talk about the existence of particular problems without showing the way to solve them. Traditionally, our educational system is not geared towards problem solving. Our educational system fills our minds with facts and figures but it does not take us to the level where we can use those facts and figures to solve our problems.

We know action speaks better than words. Within our matriculation oath is the following commitment: “I pledge to keep my environment clean and cultivate the culture of maintenance at all times and help others to do the same.” We from time to time, organise clean up campaigns which all students and staff are required to participate. In spite of all these efforts and the fact that we have place trash bins at various strategic places in our class rooms and around our campuses, we still find some students dropping thrash on the floor of our lecture rooms. But since the leadership is leading the crusade those who do that know what we stand for.

It is a natural tendency for most of us to blame others for our problems; having done that, we wait and expect others to come and solve such problems for us. This is certainly the easiest way to abdicate responsibility! It is not enough for Mr Madilo to tell the whole world that our campuses are filthy. As a leader in his own way, he will do well not just to inform the world about the problem of filth on our campuses, if indeed all our campuses are filled with filth; more importantly, he must take concrete steps (if he has not already done this) to help solve the problem, at least at his own institution, if indeed there is such a problem there. He can begin by sensitising his fellows not to dump thrash or garbage indiscriminately. This could be the beginning of a good crusade which many student-leaders, I presume, would be willing to replicate at the various campuses.

Yes, education is indeed very expensive. It cannot be cheap! It has been said if one thinks education is expensive, he or she should try ignorance! Somebody somewhere must pay for the cost of educating our people. As a nation, all stakeholders must work collectively to ensure that both public and private tertiary institutions live up to their mandate. We must pull our resources together in order to provide our people with high quality education. We should not wait for our children to travel to overseas institutions before benefiting from high quality education. It is possible to do this in our own country but all of us must contribute towards it. It must not be left only in the hands of the central government.

It is time for our policy makers and the leadership of our educational institutions to focus more on quality instead of mass production that has become the bane of our current dispensation. If, at the end of the day, the students we produce do not match up to their counterparts trained elsewhere, and someone who was once a Chancellor of our premier public university was able to publicly say that the products of Ghana's higher institutions are not fully prepared for the job market, then all of us (including those who hold the privileged positions as chancellors) should burry our heads in shame for failing to do nothing! We should be held accountable for failing to fulfil our responsibilities as stakeholders.

As a nation, we need to make every necessary effort to remove endemic challenges like overcrowding in our lecture halls and laboratories, outdated curricular, inadequate teaching and learning resources like library books and journals (actual and virtual), inadequate laboratory equipment, and the lack of currency in the part of our faculty. We cannot continue with “business as usual,” and then believe that our students can compete globally. We should not be seen to be still living in the past!

The private universities in this nation may have certain challenges; nonetheless, though relatively new on our educational terrain, they have made big inroads in the human resource development needs of our country. What appears to be lacking now, is a strong research capacity. In terms of their contribution, it can be said without any fear of contradiction that it was the private universities that structured their academic programmes in a way that made it possible for workers to combine school with work. The morning, evening, and weekend streams introduced by them was a novelty. It created opportunity for full time workers including working mothers to upgrade their knowledge, something that was not in existence before the emergence of the private universities. It was also a private university (Regent University College) that introduced the first ever postgraduate studies in computer science in this country. It can also be stated without any doubt that the first ever internationally accredited MBA (with AMBA accreditation status) to be taught in Ghana, is credited to Regent University College. Again it can be said, without any contradiction, that the private universities have brought in innovation in our tertiary educational sector.

This is the more reason why there is the strong need for the GETFund Law to be amended so that the private universities could also get their fair share to support the good work they are doing. It is in the same vein that a recent decision compelling the private universities to pay corporate tax needs to be reversed with urgency. Almost all the existing private universities are registered as companies limited by guarantee, i.e., all of them have an NGO status). If public universities and NGOs are not required to pay corporate tax, there is no justification for private universities to be compelled to pay corporate tax. The private universities have emerged as equal partners with the public universities to raise the much needed human capital for the development of our nation. Any discrimination against them, in whatever form it takes, must therefore be seen to be detrimental to the development of our nation.

We have the collective responsibility to work towards achieving a knowledge-based, highly skilled, and technologically advanced society. To this end, Ghana's higher education sector has a duty to make significant contributions to help the country gain a 21st century push in its social dream and economic development. The tertiary education sector will have to be the nation's pacesetter in innovation, and a major player in capacity building. There should be collective responsibility from all stakeholders. Our number one challenge is not money but visionary leadership and a strong will power to effect the necessary changes to ensure a sustained quality tertiary level education. Anything short of this will be, to put it mildly, detrimental to the development of our nation, and a massive waste of the human potential God has given to this nation for its emancipation from poverty, illiteracy, disease and filth, which are our common enemy and our source of disgrace. Shalom!

Credit: Kwabena Larbi
Regent University College of Science and Technology
[[email protected]]