Ghana Needs 50 Universities

Ghana needs at least 50 universities, with each of them admitting an average of 20,000 students if the country wants to address the problem of access to university education by all Ghanaians, the president of the Central University College (CUC), Prof. V.P.Y. Gadzekpo has said.

Currently, he said, the country has only 37 universities, comprising 30 private and seven public, and noted that the institutions could not cope with the high number of qualified students turned out from the second cycle schools yearly.

Prof Gadzekpo was delivering a lecture on the theme, 'A decade of successful paradigm shift in tertiary education,' in Accra in the first of a series of lectures organised to commemorate the university's 10th anniversary celebration.

He indicated that for the nation to develop, literacy level must exceed 90 per cent and that all citizens must have the opportunity to access tertiary education “because less than five per cent of the population currently enjoy tertiary education”.

Prof. Gadzekpo expressed concern that Ghana has stuck with her colonial masters, Britain, to pay lip service to private universities as that country can boast of only one private and 165 public universities.

He further blamed the National Accreditation Board for killing an initiative and creativity the private universities had wanted to inject into the tertiary education in Ghana, that a student who pursues a non-science course at the second cycle level should be able to pursue a course such as medicine, pharmacy and other related programmes.

“I know a student who read English in Legon and proceeded to do Pharmacy in Britain,”

Besides the board, he said the mentoring universities which they are affiliated to limit them in the courses that they wish to run.

“This is because we can only offer courses that the universities we are affiliated to run,” he added.