Quality education must produce employable graduates
The Dean of the Centre for International Education and Collaboration (CEIC) at the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), Professor (Mrs) Goski Alabi has said universities must respond positively to the needs of industry by producing quality graduates.
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She said employers were the best people to rate the performance of graduates and as such it was necessary to ensure that the quality of the graduates churned out from the universities met their expectations.
“Outcome quality has to do with feedback on how the product is working for the end user- functionality. Even when the graduates meet the intended learning outcomes established by the institution or accreditation body, it should be useful to the employer. It is only the employer who can tell us whether the graduates are fit for industry,” she said.
Prof. Alabi was speaking at the maiden inaugural lecture of the UPSA on the topic “Quality of higher education in Ghana: Key issues.”
She said quality of outcome had to do with the feedback that universities got from employers, labour market or industry and how they used it to inform the content of academic programmes.
“How are our universities proactively learning about labour market needs, requires, demands and expects from us. If we do not know the expectations and requirements of the labour market, how do we fulfill them?”
“How do we know whether what we are doing as universities is working well? So if industry tells us graduates are not meeting their expectations, why do we argue? This summarises the entire quality issue. The customers say they are not satisfied with the graduates we produce for them. This is a quality gap,” she said.
Labour market data
She said currently, there was no labour market data repository to help institutions plan market responsive and strategic academic programmes in Ghana.
“So how then does the NCTE assess relevance of academic programmes?For example, accountants, architects and engineers will we need in the next five years????? How many doctors do we produce and how many stay on our shores?”
“NDPC and the NCTE should be in the position to provide information on demand and supply of higher education graduates in Ghana,” she said.
The UPSA in the last five-six years has collected its own labour market data. The university collates and analyses the demand for qualification and skills from newspaper job advertisement and online sources.
This initiative, she said could be replicated, improved and scaled up at the national level. It is true that a few of the professions like doctors are not advertised in newspaper but the process still provides general information on trends of qualifications and skills required.
Relevance of academic programmes
Prof. Alabi explained that the current process deployed by the NCTE to assess academic programmes did not provide the basis on which it classifies a programme as being relevant.
“It is not clear what forms the basis of what the NCTE considers relevant, whether there is strategic data from the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations, or from the National Development Planning Commission, (NDPC) or the Ministry of Education,” she said.
She also mentioned that relevance checks by the NCTE are limited to public institutions and do not cover private institutions, leaving the private institutions to determine by themselves what is relevant.
“There is inherent duplication of relevance checks of academic programmes. Though the NAB does not does not set out to check relevance, the accreditation process builds within itself relevance checks through the criterion for stating the philosophy of academic programmes during programme accreditation for both public and private institutions,” she said.
Exhibition
Ahead of the lecture, an exhibition of the scholarly works of Prof. Alabi was mounted. As the first inaugural lecturer, she was the first to sign the 100-paged monumental inaugural book which would subsequently be signed by other lecturers who would be delivering lectures. — GB
