Postgraduate admissions to go up

Daily Graphic (Pg11) July 14/10

Story: Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho
THE Government is developing an educational policy which would mandate public universities to allocate 10 per cent of their admissions to postgraduate education.
Currently, postgraduate admissions make up only six per cent in all the public universities in the country.
This was made known by the Deputy Executive Secretary of the National Council for Tertiary Education, Mr Paul Dzandu, at a national dialogue on postgraduate education in Ghana organised by the Graduate Students Association of Ghana in Accra.
According to Mr Dzandu, who spoke on behalf of the Minister of Education, Mr Alex Tettey-Enyo, postgraduate education which focused on research and development was an important avenue for national development.
He said the government-approved norm for postgraduate intake in the public universities in the country was 10 per cent of the total student enrolment. However, data available from the NCTE indicates that out of 102,548 students enrolled in the public universities for the 2008/2009 academic year, only 5,919, representing six per cent, were postgraduate students.
He said “both the government and the leadership of the universities were aware that the survival of university education and the contribution of university to national development depended on the postgraduate education we provide.”
He added that “as a nation, we need to focus on postgraduate programmes which are of quality and relevance with research outputs geared towards the advancement of knowledge in the country and beyond.”
He said the government had so far put in place measures aimed at ensuring that postgraduate education was promoted in the country, and he mentioned some of the support provided to include an award of government bursary and thesis grant to all postgraduate students in public universities.
He said despite the challenges confronting postgraduate education in our universities, the future was not bleak.
A Lecturer at the University of Ghana, Dr Vlademir Antwi-Danso, said postgraduate education which should be the engine of growth in the country had for a long time been reduced to the acquisition of knowledge, a situation which he said was worrisome.
He said postgraduate education was a platform for research and development which should be linked with national planning and development.
Dr Antwi-Danso said for the country to be totally developed it required good leadership, resources and knowledge and when postgraduate education was well developed, it can provide the solution.
He called on the students to be aggressive in their research work, saying that they must endeavour to do proper research which would help improve national development.
The Vice Dean of the University of Ghana Graduate School, Prof. K. Ofori, who said research led to the acquisition of knowledge, also said every establishment in the country needed research for a sustainable development.
He, however, bemoaned the fact that most research work ended on book shelves.
The Dean of Nutrition and Food Science, Prof. Esther Sakyi-Dawson, said there was the need to reorient graduate students to come out with qualitative research to benefit the country.