The Council of Independent Universities led by its Chairman, Professor Kwesi Yankah had called on government to phase out the system of affiliating private universities to public universities.
This, according to the Council, will make private universities independent.
But the National Accreditation Board (NAB) has blamed the inability of private universities to attain full accreditation status on their poor human resource base.
[contextly_sidebar id=”GxyVzpoPrBXkXCPEhtj5msECHSW1nHVF”]The Executive Secretary of NAB, Kwame Dattey explained to Citi News, that most of the staff members of private universities lack the experience to merit a presidential charter that will make them fully independent.
He pointed out that before one can lecture at a public university, he or she must a minimum qualification of a Doctorate degree.
But according to him, a quick glance at the staff profile of the private universities indicates that most of them lack the needed experience.
“Because they are not looking at the minimum requirement, immediately you finish your MPhil [Master of Philosophy], you are employed full time lecturer,” he fumed.
He rhetorically asked; “is this the person who is going to award a degree to somebody? A university is not like you have WAEC so whether you have teachers or not, you all take a common examination.”
Mr Dattey further clarified that universities set their own examinations “so if you don’t get experience people to do this; it causes a lot of problems and contributes to the awarding of degrees to unqualified persons.”
He argued that Nigeria and other African states do not have the system of affiliation “which means before they will accredit you, you must have the type of human resources but how many will measure up to that?”
The debate over the quality of education and degrees being awarded by private universities in Ghana has been raging for some time now.
Some education experts have suggested that most of the private universities and colleges springing up across the country must be closed down because they lack the needed facilities to exist as institutions of higher learning.
It has also been argued that the schools are being set up solely for financial gains following the inability of most Ghanaian youth to access public universities and the obsession over the attainment of degrees.
Although the National Accreditation Board has closed down some of these mushroom private universities, some have called for stricter supervision to prevent students from being exploited by these universities.
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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