Part-time lecturers are affecting quality in private HE

The over-reliance of Ghana’s private universities on part-time and adjunct faculty is affecting teaching consistency and quality, which have been identified as among the many problems these new higher education institutions are facing, Lucy Agyepong, the vice president of Academic City University College, a private university in Accra, has said.

Presenting a paper on ‘Development and growth of private universities in Ghana: Implications for access, equity, and sustainability’, which she co-authored with colleagues Abena Engmann and George Miller, Agyepong said: “over-reliance on part-time staff can negatively impact teaching quality, particularly in research ...”

She was speaking at a policy dialogue organised by the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (GAAS) on 29 October.

This was the last of seven policy dialogues under the GAAS project titled, ‘Motivating higher education reforms in Ghana – Towards equity and sustainability’, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Said Agyepong: “Financial limitations hinder the recruitment of qualified PhD holders as the salaries [private institution offer to them] are often uncompetitive.” She added that, on the surface, the salaries may seem to be a simple issue, but when one looks at the benefits and conditions of service such as the provisioning of accommodation and transport, “it makes it highly uncompetitive for people in the public sector to move to the private sector”.

“So, what we are actually seeing is that a lot of new faculty who start their academic journeys join private universities, get their experience [moving up the ranks], and when they get the opportunity, they run to the public sector. But, once they retire, we help them again,” she added.

Growth in private higher education

Agyepong said that, over the years, there has been an increased demand for tertiary education reforms, which has led to a big surge in private institutions.

A closer look at the population growth, as well as the increase in enrolment numbers in tertiary institutions, and the inability of public institutions to swallow them all, confirmed the need for private institutions.

She said it was expected that, with the upsurge of private institutions, the country would see an increase in quality in tertiary education, bridging some of the gaps in infrastructure and access, as well as see how young people grow to become top-notch scientists and business entrepreneurs through specialised programme offers and curriculums that are designed to appeal to the industry.

Agyepong said that “there was an expectation that private universities would make public universities a little bit unattractive to those who desire a more personalised learning environment and development, and to aspire for more academic excellence. So, this expectation boosted the popularity of private universities in the early 2000s”.

“However, the reality is that not all private institutions have been able to get to that level of excellence. In actual fact, some studies have documented that there are challenges that private universities face in general,” she added.

Agyepong said the cost of funding for public higher education institutions is regulated by the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission, which advises the ministry of education on issues of finance. But private institutions are not covered and have to be heavily reliant on tuition and other fees.

Redrafting the higher education map

In an address, Kofi Opoku Nti, the president of GAAS, said the goal of the academy’s higher education project is to provide a platform for stakeholders to reflect on an ongoing basis about the challenges of the higher education sector.

“We aim to bring together different stakeholders to undertake reviews of current policies and inject independent research evidence to re-form new policy considerations,” Nti said, adding that, “It is incredible how Ghana went from a purely state university system with a handful of specialised universities to a new landscape of close to 100 private universities in the past 30 years or so.”

He said many of the founders and promoters of the private universities were visionaries and entrepreneurs who saw opportunities to provide missing services the public universities were not delivering, mentioning the issues of access quality and one-size-fits-all frameworks as some of the problems they had to face.

Unfortunately, “like most entrants in a new market, they had to create sustained strategies to differentiate themselves from each other and from the existing public universities”.

Nti said “there was a rub”, as the regulatory environment required them to be mentored by their potential competitors. In addition, he said, the private entities were expected to be replicas of the existing public universities that had existed for almost half a century and accumulated a wealth of infrastructure, faculty, alumni and well-recognised programmes.

William Koomson, the president of the Valley View University, suggested that the government should provide support to children for them to be able to choose which university they want to attend, as the current situation in which government offered support only to students in the public sector put those in the private sector at a disadvantage.