Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, Ghana's former Minister of Education, recently described university degree programmes such as Development Studies and BA Education (Non-Teaching) as "degrees to nowhere," sparking heated public conversation.
The debate that followed his comments is not new. It is a question university administrators, faculty, staff, policymakers and families have been grappling with for years.
Predictably, the comment set off a public stir, with strong opinions either supporting or opposing the former minister's words.
Underneath the noise, however un-artfully the point was made, the comment sits at the heart of a genuine tension in post-secondary education, not just in Ghana but globally.
That tension is this: what is the overall value proposition of post-secondary education, and how do we articulate it while staying fully aware of certain realities?
The Tension
Take a moment and think about the people who are on the frontline of recruiting students during an admission cycle and cannot avoid framing the value proposition of a university degree in economic terms, a job and earning potential.
It is also precisely why universities in certain jurisdictions include in their communication and marketing materials examples of what their graduates have gone on to do in terms of employment, or why they point to opportunities such as experiential learning and internships as a way of preparing students for the job market.
In the twenty years I spent in American higher education, it was not uncommon for a prospective student, or more often a worried parent, to ask a version of the same question: what job can I get with this degree, and how much will it pay me?
That question is not cynical; it is a rational response to the cost and sacrifice of earning a degree.
That reality, however, collides with another imperative: selling the idea of a university degree for something beyond its economic payoff, namely its intrinsic value, the development of the whole person.
Yet universities also know, often painfully, that intrinsic value alone does not solve enrolment or falling public confidence challenges.
Parents, policymakers and accreditation bodies alike keep asking what graduates "get" after they leave, particularly in contexts where the cost of a degree drives families into debt.
Ghana, with its own rising cost of university education and a labour market unable to employ all its graduates, must confront this same question.
My own view is this: we do not resolve this difficult but healthy tension by reducing it to a binary argument of "useless" versus "non-useless" degrees, and certainly not by making it personal to any discipline or the people who teach and study it.
What we need is a public discourse that converges on a value proposition for university education robust enough to reconcile its competing imperatives, economic and intrinsic, individual and societal, immediate and long-term.
The Policy Implications
But there is a more important lesson buried in this episode, and in my view it has less to do with degrees and more to do with how we approach post-secondary education policy.
A former minister's offhand remark should not be the vehicle through which policy decisions are made about the value of programmes offered by universities.
If we genuinely believe that some programmes are out of sync with labour market needs, the honest response is not more pronouncements about "useless" versus "non-useless" degrees, but a rigorous conversation in which stakeholders examine longitudinal data tracking post-graduation outcomes across disciplines, alongside the various policy solutions already tried to address them.
Anything less invites exactly what we are seeing now: an emotionally charged conversation, personalised by some, generating no ideas that allow us to develop durable post-secondary education policy.
But there is also something ironic about this conversation. If unemployment and earnings alone were the yardstick for determining the value of a university degree, several other university programmes would be just as indictable as Development Studies and BA Education (Non-Teaching), the two the former minister cited, given how many of their graduates also face unemployment or underemployment with modest earnings.
We must acknowledge that the real culprit is not the credential but whether we have built an economy with the capacity to absorb our graduates across different academic disciplines.
The minister's sound bite, however well-intentioned but improperly stated, is an opportunity for us to confront this tension, the imperatives of post-graduation outcomes (jobs and earnings) and the intrinsic value of a university education (developing the whole person).
If we don't, we will keep having this argument, loudly and unproductively, every few years.
But we cannot remain stuck perpetually in a cycle of arguing about "useless" and "non-useless" degrees.
The writer is Project Director, Democracy Project
