Universities To Increase Intake By 15 to 100% - Okudzeto Ablakwa

Deputy Minister for Education, Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa has revealed that the various universities, polytechnics and colleges across the country will admit between 15 and 100% more students to cater for the over 400,000 senior high school graduates.

�UPS will do 100%, University of Education will do 50 to 70%, KNUST is doing 25 to 35%, UMAT is doing 13%, UCC is doing 15 to 25% and will take an additional 1000 for their new Accra campus,� he stated.

According to the Minister, since the priority of the institutions were the first year students, accommodation was not going to be a problem as the current accommodation policy was going to be maintained.

�The current in-out-out-out policy will continue because these are students who are new to the environment and therefore have to be protected as much as possible. There is enough room for them but it will mean more continuing students will have to fend for themselves,� he stated.

Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show, Hon Ablakwa said they (Ministry) were, �encouraging private developers to look into the provision of hostels because government cannot do it all. There is enough profit and pull factors for the private sector there. Lecturers are not having time for research because they are burdened and that is why we are opening up to approve more requests which are coming in from these institutions to recruit.�

We just finished a national education sector review and we came to the conclusion that the problem of lack of quality is not about the unavailability of lecturers but certain mechanism and other systems that were failing� It is not a lack of manpower but it is to put in place the relevant monitoring mechanisms� so we cannot reduce the lack of quality to the numbers,� he added.

Under the Kufuor administration, the duration of SHS was increased from three years to four years. Late President Mills, after taking office in 2009, reverted the system back to three years.

This meant that two streams of students, the four-year and three-year SHS batches, both wrote the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) in 2013.

It is estimated that 409,832 candidates wrote the examination throughout the country as against the 173,655 who wrote the examination last year.

The fate of over 400,000 SHS graduates that completed their education this year has thus become a major issue of debate among stakeholders in the nation's education sector.

Source: citifmonline.com