Preparing for tertiary admissions
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Any nation that does not provide the resources for the education of its citizens will lag behind in development.
This failure on the part of any government will provide the fertile ground for half-baked intellectuals and skilled people to serve as the human capital for personal and national accomplishments.
Our educational system may not be in the best of shapes presently, but it still consumes a large portion of the national budget.
What this means is that education is still on the priority list of all our governments, except that the actions are not far-reaching enough to resolve the challenges in the sector.
The country’s educational system began its downward slide in the 1970s when many of our teachers joined the brain drain to seek greener pastures elsewhere, particularly in Nigeria, when it became difficult for working people to achieve self-fulfilment.
Unfortunately for the nation, that was the same period when the then government initiated the educational reform programme with experimental junior secondary schools (JSSs), with at least one in each region.
The reforms stalled because of economic challenges, but they were revised in the 1980s with the expansion of the JSS system to include senior high schools (SHS).
The new system had its own challenges, compounded by the political decision of the three and four-year duration of SHS education inflicted on the nation by the Kufuor and the Mills administrations.
We are reaping the ‘gains’ by way of the two batches of students who completed SHS this year and are awaiting their results to seek admission to the universities and other tertiary institutions.
The challenge ahead can cause social upheavals if not handled properly to enable the young SHS ‘graduates’ to further their education.
We may be sitting on a time bomb, as employment opportunities are also unavailable to absorb the teeming young people who are likely to join the ranks of unemployed graduates.
Already, heads of tertiary institutions are experiencing sleepless nights over admission blues this year because more than 400,000 students from SHSs will be knocking at their doors by August for opportunities to pursue higher education.
We are not to clear how many students will gain admission to the public and private universities, the polytechnics, the colleges of education, the nurses training colleges, as well as allied institutions.
Whatever thinking the university administrators do outside the box, they will not be able to admit half of the students who wrote the West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) last May.
The government has announced the allocation of GH¢7 million to public tertiary institutions to expand their facilities to enable them to increase their intake of students next academic year.
We think the government has done its best, but we think this action has come a bit late in the day.
The Daily Graphic wonders whether from now to the beginning of the next academic year, the heads of tertiary institutions will be able to provide additional facilities to absorb the freshers to pursue higher education.
The task is Herculean because of the cumbersome processes of awarding contracts in the public sector.
Going forward, our government should be made to sign a social contract with the people never to politicise education again.
This calls for a national forum on education in which all interest groups will sign up to a blueprint on education from which no government shall make a U-turn.
The Daily Graphic views the social contract as the best way to depoliticise education because the low standards of education will impact negatively on the country’s development process.
We do not think this is the time to bemoan the challenges. We, therefore, call on all to volunteer ideas and resources in our quest to provide the facilities for quality education at all levels.
The nation’s forward march depends on a highly skilled manpower base that can only be produced by an effective and efficient educational system
That also depends on a well-motivated teaching force that will spearhead the teaching, learning and research process in our schools.