Degree to Nowhere? Ghana's Tertiary Education Reckoning Is Overdue, But the Diagnosis Is Incomplete

A single podcast appearance has reopened one of Ghana's most uncomfortable national conversations: whether the country's universities are producing graduates the economy actually needs, or simply manufacturing certificates that lead, in the words of former Education Minister Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, to "nowhere."

Speaking on the Konnected Minds podcast this week, Dr Adutwum singled out two programmes for particular criticism: Development Studies at the University for Development Studies (UDS) and the BA Education (Non-Teaching) track at the University of Ghana. His argument was blunt. Universities, he said, are admitting students into courses with no clear labour-market destination, driven less by national planning than by the simple economics of tuition collection. He recalled telling a UDS audience years earlier, during an address at the annual New Year School, that the country did not need a whole degree programme built around the word "development" itself and noted, almost with satisfaction, that a Vice-Chancellor later informed him one student had withdrawn from the course after hearing his remarks.

His prescription is one Ghana has heard in fragments before but rarely applied with discipline: universities should conduct labour-needs assessments and shape admissions and curricula around what the police service, the military, hospitals, and industry are actually short of, rather than what fills lecture halls. He pointed to India's IT sector as the model of what deliberate alignment between higher education and economic strategy can produce.

The rebuttal came fast, and from a serious quarter. Governance expert Prof. Kwaku Asare pushed back within a day, arguing that the deeper problem is not the degree programmes themselves but the political and economic structures that fail to absorb graduates into meaningful employment. His sharper point was structural: Ghana's political parties, built in principle as vehicles for national development, have too often degenerated into machinery for patronage and self-enrichment, and no amount of curriculum reform fixes an economy that cannot generate jobs regardless of what graduates studied. Fix the politics, in his framing, and the economy gets a fighting chance with or without a Development Studies degree in the mix.

Both men are right, and both are incomplete, and that is precisely why this debate refuses to die every few months in Accra's op-ed pages.

Dr Adutwum's diagnosis has institutional teeth behind it. GTEC's own Director-General, Prof. Ahmed Jinapor, has separately admitted that Ghanaian universities have a habit of cutting and pasting foreign curricula without regard for local absorption capacity, and that with 321 tertiary institutions now operating in the country, a great many satellite campuses exist less to serve national need than to generate revenue. That is not a partisan talking point; it is the regulator conceding the point against his own sector.

A country that trains disproportionately for white-collar administrative roles while running a persistent shortfall of nurses, engineers, and technicians has a planning failure, not merely a market failure.

But Prof. Asare's structural critique cannot be waved off either. Ghana's graduate unemployment problem long predates any single cohort of "useless" degrees, and engineering and STEM graduates are not immune to it plenty leave university with the "right" credential and still queue for jobs that a stagnant private sector and a patronage-driven public service are not creating fast enough.

Renaming Development Studies or shutting down BA Education (Non-Teaching) will not, by itself, manufacture the industrial base, the manufacturing jobs, or the private-sector dynamism that would absorb tens of thousands of new graduates every year. The disease is partly curricular, but it is substantially macroeconomic and political, and treating only the former risks a familiar Ghanaian pattern: reform theatre that reassures the public without changing outcomes.

There is also a discipline-level argument that gets lost whenever this debate flares. Development Studies, sociology, philosophy, and the humanities broadly are not "useless" in any intellectual sense they remain central to how a society understands itself, trains its bureaucrats, and produces the analysts, policy researchers, and yes, columnists, who interrogate power.

The legitimate complaint is not that these fields exist, but that Ghanaian universities have often taught them generically, without the applied specialization, data literacy, or professional certification pathways that would make a sociology or development graduate employable in research houses, NGOs, or government planning units.

The fix for a "degree to nowhere" is frequently not abolition but redesign: sharper applied tracks, mandatory internships, and closer integration with the institutions ministries, district assemblies, multilateral agencies that actually hire this expertise.

What both men agree on, even if only implicitly, that Ghana is has never seriously operationalized labour-market forecasting as an input into university admissions. GTEC has the regulatory mandate to require this; it has not yet been given, or has not yet seized, the teeth to enforce it against universities that treat programme proliferation as a revenue strategy.

Until that change, the country will keep having this same argument every eighteen months, with a different minister naming a different pair of "useless" degrees, while the graduates already in the pipeline remain stuck exactly where they were.

The honest position sits between the two men's public sparring: reform the curriculum and the admissions logic, yes but do not pretend that renaming Development Studies will substitute for the harder, slower work of fixing the political economy that Prof. Asare rightly says is failing to absorb the graduates Ghana already has.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.

International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP

mustysallama@gmail.com
+233-555-275-880
References
Graphic Online, "Some university courses are ‘useless’ Fmr Education Minister Adutwum calls out 2 programmes," July 4, 2026. https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/education/some-university-courses-are-useless-fmr-education-minister-adutwum-calls-out-2-programmes.html

Graphic Online, "Kwaku Asare to Adutwum: Don't blame degrees, blame the economy that fails to absorb graduates," July 5, 2026. https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/kwaku-asare-to-adutwum-dont-blame-degrees-blame-the-economy-that-fails-to-absorb-graduates.html

MyJoyOnline, "'Degree to nowhere': Dr Adutwum questions relevance of some university programmes," July 4, 2026. https://www.myjoyonline.com/degree-to-nowhere-dr-adutwum-questions-relevance-of-some-university-programmes/

Graphic Online, "Parliamentary Select Committee backs GTEC cleaning exercise." https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/ghana-news-parliamentary-select-committee-backs-gtec-cleaning-exercise.html

MyJoyOnline, "Parliamentary Select Committee on Education worries over exorbitant distance education fees," July 2026. https://www.myjoyonline.com/parliamentary-select-committee-on-education-worries-over-exorbitant-distance-education-fees/

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