President Akufo-Addo has tasked public universities to brace for an astronomical increase in prospective students following the government’s implementation of Free Senior High School (SHS) policy.
He used the occasion of the investiture of the first female chancellor of the University of Ghana, Mary Chinery-Hesse, to alert Vice-Chancellors across the country’s to prepare to absorb an expected marked increase in applicants.
Already, second cycle institutions are reeling from the effects of a government intervention to ensure every qualified student makes it to SHS without the barrier of tuition.
About 110,000 qualifed students fail to enter into SHS because of financial constraints, a barrier the government removed in September 2017 when it started free SHS.
Pumping ¢651m ($148m) of Ghana’s oil revenue into the two-year-old policy, government has seen schools bursting it seams as class sizes reach 120 students in some cases.
An estimated figure of close to 400,000 qualified students are expected to benefit from the Free SHS policy in 2018. The figure is a 30% increase in the 2017 batch of free SHS beneficiaries.
Government appears to have been caught flat-footed with this consequence of public policy and has been compelled to introduce a policy game-changer – the double track system.
For the first time in Ghana’s history, SHS students would be split into two tracks so that while one is in school, the other will be on vacation awaiting their turn.
In two years time, beneficiaries of Free SHS education would have passed out and would be seeking to access tertiary education.
The President called his free SHS policy a “permanent feature in country’s educational architecture” and told university authorities, they have an “important immediate challenge” to prepare for it.
“We cannot be caught off guard”, he said. But the opposition has said government has been caught off guard by its own policy.
They have lampooned the government for lacking the foresight the president has urged Vice-Chancellors to develop.
While the president advice to public universities is a repeat of the Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II’s advice to his government on July 15, 2018.
“The potential increase in enrollment at the tertiary level will require a corresponding increase in resources; both financial and human to be able to cope with the student numbers. The time to act is now,” he said at the 52nd Congregation of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).
Government has indicated GETFUND will be used to prioritise infrastructural expansion at tertiary institutions.
While government policy continues to have radical effects on infrastructure and funding, it remains to be seen if the economy will in four years time be prepared to absorb another expected increase in graduate job seekers who benefited from free SHS.
Source:Myjoyonline