Editorial: Varsities churning out over 150k students, but where are the jobs?

We used this column yesterday to express our concerns over the springing up of skyscrapers in Accra, without the corresponding provision of modern equipment for the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS).

We noted that though some of these high-rise buildings have as many as 25 floors, the GNFS does not have the fire tenders that can take its personnel to the top floors, in case there is a fire outbreak.

Though we stand to be corrected, we do not think the country has firefighting helicopters either, that could be deployed should any of these high-rise buildings catch fire. Our conclusion was that we, as a country, have failed to plan ahead of time, otherwise, these firefighting equipment should have been procured before granting permits to investors to put up such buildings.

Unfortunately, it is not only in the construction side that we have failed to plan ahead of time, but in the educational sector as well. According to a Graphic online report in 2021, Ghana is churning out 110,000 youth graduates from our universities every year. Fast forward to 2023, we can extrapolate that between 150,000 to 180,000 university students are being churned out each year.

The big question is: can the job market absorb all these graduates produced each year? The answer, we must admit, is a big no! Much as education is the bedrock for the development of every country, we should not open the floodgates for the establishment of more universities when we have not correspondingly expanded the economy to enable these graduates secure jobs upon completion of their courses.

Now universities have been established in every nook and cranny of this country. Students attending these tertiary institutions are being charged exorbitant fees, but because parents want their children to be educated, they have no option than to pay. Meanwhile, after investing these huge sums of money in educating their wards, the latter pass out without any job to do.

Interestingly, the public universities have also joined this bandwagon of making money from poor students, by moving away from the core mandate of their establishment to other areas.

For instance, until recent years, only University of Ghana, Legon was mandated to train law students. But what are we seeing today – Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, which is supposed to focus on Science and Technology has also started training law students.

The University of Cape Coast, that is supposed to train teachers, has also veered into the training of lawyers. The same can be said about the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, which is also offering LLB courses. Apart from these public universities, several private tertiary institutions are also offering LLB courses.

As we noted earlier, under normal circumstances, this shouldn’t ruffle any feathers, but looking at the size of our economy, how can all these law graduates be employed upon completion of their courses?

In the United Kingdom, United States and Canada among others, where universities are common, they have the corresponding resilient economy to back the teeming graduates that are produced, but can we say same in Ghana?

In our opinion, the universities are springing up in Ghana as pure business entities and do not care whether the students they are training will have jobs or not, after competing their respective courses.

This is very sad, but we will not blame the businessmen and women behind them, but rather the state that has failed to plan ahead of time. The National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), which should have come out with development strategy for the country has itself become a toothless mongrel.

In fact, it has been politicised to the extent that all policies and programmes it comes out with are thrown overboard by succeeding governments, though it is a constitutional creation.

The gloomy picture notwithstanding, we do not think everything has been lost.  The government must start thinking outside the box on how to expand the economy, so that all these students being churned out year in and year out will have jobs to do.

The jobless youth are a security threat to this nation and the earlier we start proper planning, the better it will be for us all.

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