In 2006, Michael Shattock, visiting professor at the Institute of Education, University of London, travelled to Ghana to advise what was probably the country’s most prestigious institution.

What he discovered at the University of Ghana, he says, was “absolute chaos”: it had 151 separate bank accounts, up to 10 students sharing a bedroom and not even a functioning water system. Shattock concedes the situation is now much improved. But Ghana as a whole is still bedevilled by the growing pains of a rapidly expanding higher education system which lacks proper funding and a scarcity of jobs for graduates.

These problems are widespread across Africa and other parts of the developing world. But their scale in Ghana, otherwise regarded as a prosperous, oil-rich regional success story, is striking. After rapid growth in higher education enrolments throughout the 1990s and 2000s, some estimates suggest that graduate unemployment is running at 50 percent. As a result, 150 ministers and former ministers, university leaders, education experts (including Shattock), lecturers and student representatives gathered in the capital Accra on May 8-9 to discuss what should be done. The conference’s concluding communique includes a number of damning observations.

“There is no comprehensive national policy on tertiary education in the country,” it states, adding that despite an “exponential increase” over the past decade in the number of young Ghanaians going into higher education, national policies have not been enacted to ensure that this flood of new students addresses Ghana’s social and economic needs. In addition, the communique states, higher education remains “grossly underfunded”.

Research presented during the two-day meeting supports these conclusions. According to Ivan Addae-Mensah, former vice chancellor (1996-2002) of the University of Ghana, there were just 9,000 students in Ghana’s three public universities in 1987. But by 2010, he says, the country had six public universities with 115,346 students. Burgeoning enrolments in newly created polytechnics, colleges of higher education and other specialist institutions, meanwhile, sent total tertiary enrolments soaring above 200,000.

Public funding has rallied during the 2000s, which has stemmed the decline. Between 2006-2010, funding per student more than doubled — albeit to a modest £970 (Rs.87,709) per year, less than 40 percent of the amount recommended by the country’s National Council for Tertiary Education. However, the conference heard that Ghana is already spending a healthy proportion of its gross domestic product on tertiary education — 2 percent in 2009, compared with the 1.3 percent spent in the UK the same year, as estimated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The conference agreed there is “over-reliance on government for funding tertiary education”, but Addae-Mensah puts it more bluntly: “We should not deceive ourselves that the oil revenue is the sole panacea for education funding.” He wants more money to come from student fees, and other academics suggest trebling the proportion of fee-paying students to 15 percent.

But Shattock believes the problem is “not just a question of money”. When he advised the University of Ghana, he found it had “more money than it realised but it didn’t have its accounts done”.

But a bigger problem, he says, is the “mission creep” of Ghana’s polytechnics, which have strayed from their original task of providing scientific higher education and moved into offering business and humanities courses instead. “Several institutions run just business administration and marketing programmes,” says Clifford Tagoe, who was vice chancellor of the University of Ghana (2005-2010). But, he asks, what will their students market if there are no graduates to produce anything? The conference resolved to correct this subject “imbalance”, although it did not decide on an exact ratio.

Shattock believes that regardless of what the government does, and despite a “Daily Mail, Daily Express-style” anxiety that too many young people are going to university and Ghana is producing far too many graduates, it is likely that in ten years’ time a quarter of young Ghanaians will go into higher education, a dramatic increase from the 9 percent who do so now. “Don’t worry so much that they don’t have jobs,” he says, predicting that because Ghana is “the most stable and probably the most prosperous of West African countries”, an expansion in the number of well-trained graduates is bound to attract international firms and investment.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)