The Ministry of Education is planning to introduce a placement system for the admission of students to tertiary institutions.
The new system will replace the current stressful and expensive system where applicants purchase separate application forms for each university.
The proposal for the adoption of the centralised system was submitted by a nine-member committee the ministry set up to holistically look at tertiary education in the country and come up with recommendations on how to make it more functional.
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After completing its work, the committee, under the chairmanship of Prof. Cliff Tagoe, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Legon, submitted the Tertiary Education Policy Document to the ministry on November 1, 2018.
The Minister of State in charge of Tertiary Education, Prof. Kwesi Yankah, made this known at the opening ceremony of a stakeholders’ workshop to validate the Tertiary Education Policy Document in Koforidua last Friday.
Workshop
The workshop, organised by the Ministry of Education, was to produce a reference document containing essential government policies and institutional best practices that would position tertiary educational institutions to optimally execute their national and institutional mandates.
It brought together all the 10 vice-chancellors of the traditional universities, representatives of technical and private universities, principals of colleges of education, regulatory bodies, the Reform Secretariat of the Ministry of Education, the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG), the Teachers and Educational Workers Union (TEWU) and other stakeholders.
“One proposal currently under contemplation by the Ministry of Education has also incidentally been proposed by this draft policy document. It is the proposal for a Centralised University Admissions and Placement Service (CAPS), which replaces the stressful and rather expensive system of applying to separate universities in Ghana with a centralised system, where applicants list their choices of university on a single platform,” Prof. Yankah stated.
Prof. Yankah said exploratory visits had been made to the United Kingdom (UK ) and Nigeria by the Ministry of Education and vice-chancellors and registrars to understudy how the system worked in the two countries.
He gave an update on the number of measures being taken by the government to give more meaning to tertiary education.
For instance, he said, a national committee on centralised admissions to universities, to be chaired by Prof. Adow Obeng, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast and currently the President of the Presbyterian University College, was scheduled to be inaugurated on Thursday, January 17, 2019 to facilitate the process.
Measures
Additionally, a number of bills on tertiary education had also reached various stages of consideration in the legislative process, he said.
Prof. Yankah said a bill splitting the University for Development Studies (UDS) into three autonomous universities was in Parliament, while the Ghana Technology University Bill was also at the Attorney-General’s Department for consideration.
He said the University of Media Arts and Communications Bill intended to merge the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI), the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) and the Ghana Institute of Languages (GIL) as one university was at the Cabinet for consideration.
