Thousands of Ghanaian youth and parents thronged Accra and Kumasi to participate in the college fair organised by the US Embassy to expose prospective students to universities in that country.
The United States Embassy's EducationUSA programme brought together more than 3,000 students, applicants, parents and school counsellors in Kumasi last Wednesday and in Accra on Friday to interact with 30 accredited American colleges and universities face-to-face to understand their offerings and requirements.
Organising officials described the fair, which is part of activities marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, as central to the country's founding, anchored on the American conviction that opportunity should be open to anyone willing to work for it.
At the opening of the fair in Accra, the Chargé d'Affaires of the US Embassy in Ghana, Rolf Olson, said the numbers behind the fair told a story of sacrifice by Ghanaian families.
"Behind those numbers are families who have prioritised education and decided that it's worth the sacrifice, the application fees, the standardised tests, the hard conversations about what is possible," he said.
Mr Olson said the fair was not an abstract exercise for him personally, noting that he was currently going through the college search process with his own daughter, a high school senior in the US, with his oldest son in his third year at Temple University, one of the institutions represented at the fair.
Rising numbers
According to Mr Olson, Ghana now ranked 14th in the world as a source of international students to the United States, a standing he attributed partly to the work of Ghanaian students, families and educators, and partly to the priority the embassy had placed on processing student visa applications.
He cited figures showing that in the 2019/2020 academic year, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately 4,000 Ghanaians were studying in the United States.
As of the 2024/2025 academic year, the most recent data, that figure had climbed to 12,800, more than tripling within six years.
Valuable opportunity
The Director of Pre-Tertiary Education at the Ministry of Education, Nana Baffour Awuah, who represented the ministry, described the fair as a valuable opportunity for Ghanaian students, saying many of the programmes on offer aligned with what local students aspired to study.
He urged students to weigh not only the academic programmes available but also the scholarship opportunities attached and to ensure that their choices matched their own goals, so that they could return home with skills to help develop the country.
Student voices
Among the students weaving between the more than two-dozen university booths, many said they had already zeroed in on favourites.
One prospective applicant said the University of Massachusetts Lowell had caught her attention because of its Computer Science programme and its student-to-faculty ratio of 17 to one, which she said meant more individual attention from lecturers.
Recruiter's pitch
Dhairya Gohel, who represented the University of Vermont, described his university as sitting on roughly 460 acres of greenery in a small college town three hours north of Boston and a 45-minute flight from New York, offering programmes spanning STEM, MBA, public health, environmental sciences and health sciences.
