Useless Degrees? Adutwum's Bold Claim Has Ghana Talking

Dr Adutwum makes a case that sounds airtight until you sit with it for a minute. He wants university admissions matched to a labour needs assessment, so the country only trains the engineers, nurses and doctors it can immediately employ. On paper, that solves graduate unemployment. In practice, it assumes we can predict the job market years in advance, and history says we can't.

Take Development Studies. It sits at the centre of understanding how rural economies grow, how aid programmes actually work on the ground, and how policy translates into results in real communities. Ghana's biggest development failures, from abandoned rural projects to poorly targeted interventions, often trace back to a shortage of people who understand development as a discipline, not a shortage of engineers.

The BA in Education Non-Teaching argument deserves scrutiny too. Not every education graduate needs to stand in front of a classroom. Curriculum design, educational policy, textbook development, school administration and NGO education work all need people trained in education who are not classroom teachers. If graduates from this programme are struggling, the honest question is whether the labour market has been developed to absorb them, not whether the course should disappear.

And here is the deeper problem with blaming universities alone. A labour needs assessment tells you what jobs exist today. It cannot tell you what a student's four years of study will look like against the economy of tomorrow. China removed thousands of degree programmes chasing AI relevance and is now discovering some of those fields still had value. Predicting the market with certainty is a gamble dressed up as policy.

The graduate unemployment crisis in Ghana is real and painful. But the fix is not narrowing what universities are allowed to teach. It is building an economy that can absorb graduates from a wide range of disciplines, strengthening internship pipelines, and investing in sectors that create jobs for social scientists and educators, not just engineers.

Scrapping courses is the easy headline. Building an economy that uses all kinds of graduates is the harder, more honest work.

Where do you stand? Is the problem the courses we teach, or the jobs we have failed to create?

About the Author
Alpha Osei Amoako is the Head of Alpha Pathway Educational Consult, an educational consult in Ghana. He is an educational leader, school administrator and education columnist based in Accra, Ghana. He writes regularly on education, society and public affairs for modernghana.com, one of Ghana's leading online platforms for commentary and analysis. He also engages a wide Ghanaian audience through social commentary on Facebook, where he addresses issues at the intersection of education, culture and national development.

[email protected] // +233208007439