Perceptions about private universities must change – NGO

Madam Charlotte Owusu, Administrator of I-texon, an educational NGO, has observed that the perception that private universities were inferior must change in the interest of education, to ensure that many people accessed higher education.

She noted that the private universities were filling in the gaps, where the public universities were unable to admit students, not because of poor grades but base on reasons such as inadequate facilities and the rest, so the private universities were rather complementing the government’s effort and must be seen as such.

Madam Owusu noted that the erroneous perceptions that the private universities were inferior and second class institutions were doing more harm than good “because many students were accepting to do programs not of their choice at the public universities base on the image and prestige of those public universities”.’

The Administrator who was briefing the GNA at the 10th edition of the Eastern Regional Higher Education Fair, at the Oyoko Methodist Senior High School, near Koforidua, said most of the lecturers at the public universities were the same who lectured at the private universities and added that it was a case of giving access to many, other than the few that the public ones were able to take.

The Ghana Higher Education Fair is organized once every year by I-texon Ghana, in collaboration with the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the National Accreditation Board (NAB) for senior high school students through career guidance and counselling to increase access to higher education.

The fair creates the platform for all the universities both the public and private to market their programmes and give enough information to the students on the career path of the various programmes they were offering and its access courses at the universities.

Madam Owusu said the erroneous perception about the private universities, gained roots from the phenomenon where some public senior high schools have been rated as first class schools and therefore better than the rest and called on the Ministry of Education to address that anomaly.

She emphasized that if government was going to provide free access to all Ghanaian children to the senior high schools, then that ratings of the first class schools must be addressed by “ensuring that all schools admitted people at the same cut off point of the aggregate 36, so that no school would be forced to pick the low grade students and by doing so be rated as second class”

The three-day fair in the Eastern Region, is being patronized by all the senior high schools in the Region and is scheduled to end on Saturday.

Source: GNA