Currently, the greatest problem facing the private universities is the dwindling number of students and the ability of some of the students to pay the fees charged. Many of the students once they are able to mobilise resources to pay the admission fees and the Level 100 fees find it difficult to meet the subsequent fees obligation. Thus almost all the private universities are owed school fees by their students. Since there is a limit to the amount of school fees which can be charged, this also affects the amount of salaries which can be paid by the private universities to their staff, especially their lecturers, and the regularity of salary payment. Despite these serious problems, there are many people who are still applying to establish private universities or institutions within the class of universities. It appears to be the latest craze in the country.
National Accreditation Board (NAB) uses the same guidelines to assess both private and public universities in granting accreditation for the establishment of a university. Since the public universities’ are better endowed than the private universities in many aspects, it might appear unfair to entrepreneurs wishing to establish private university. However, nobody forces anybody to go into the university business. Again the collapse of a university has far greater consequences for the community, not the least the trauma of placing the displaced students, nothing should be taken for granted in the assessment.
A university should have a governing council with responsibility for academic and financial matters, independent financial administration separate from the proprietor’s private and other businesses and a strong working registrar department responsible for both academic and general administration. While the public universities do not have problem meeting these criteria, the situation very often differs from the private universites. Many of the private universities are in theory, owned by husband and wife while the reality on the ground is that the husband, most of the time, has the beneficial ownership and provides the financial backbone to the university. There are some private univariates where the husband is the chancellor and the wife either the vice-chancellor or the president or principal or rector by whatever name the proprietor chooses.
The husband and wife constitute the personnel who are signatories and sign on the bank account of the university and approve the incurrence of expenditure. A governing council will definitely be in place consisting of trusted friends of the proprietor and where the proprietor is smart may appoint a retired professor from a public university either as the chairman of the council or the vice-chancellor. Again the registrar might be a former senior worker of a public university in retirement. In effect, all decision making lies in the armpit of the proprietor with the governing council very often playing a “simpa panin” role.
It is on record that many of the public universites are what they are because of massive injection of finances from the GETFund. The GETFund while it was still vibrant and relevant during the era of Kufuor’s NPP administration, provided not only scholarships for the manpower developmental needs of the public universities through the National Council for Tertiary Education but also financed many of the infrastructural projects one sees on our university campuses today. Some polytechnics were virtual built from the ground by GETFund. The private universities do not have the financial muscles and state patronage of the public universities. So the private universities very often face serious challenges in those areas, not the least in the recruitment of lecturers. Today, there is a rule in the country that a university lecturer must of necessity be a PhD holder while transition provision has been made for holders of M.Phil. degrees to teach.
Universities are expected to have staff development policies in place to train and develop the employees. While the private universities almost invariably do not have the resources to embark on such long-term projects of sponsoring their lectures on PhD programmes, they cannot also guarantee themselves that after a lecturer has completed such a programme he or she will stay. While most of the private universities restrict themselves to the mounting of first degree programmes, many of which has little research content, it does not make sense why a person with post-graduate degrees besides M.Phil. or holders of professional qualifications should of necessity be debarred from teaching.
Today, as a result of the rule, many young lecturers on our university campuses are themselves full-time students with their academic work as students competing with their academic as lecturers. In the public universites, a lecturer with M.Phil. is given a three year contract within which to qualify as a PhD holder otherwise the contract appointment stands in danger of being terminated. There is the need to review this aspect since it does not appear to have any rationale.
One of the golden rules in establishing a university is to start slowly on infrastructural development while you add on to as progress is made. However, the NAB guidelines do not appear to take this business model into account. I was surprised to learn from one private university that the assessors sent down by NAB had insisted that the university should replace all its fixed doors with revolving ones. I shouted to myself how many public building in this country are fixed with revolving doors not to talk of all our public universities. My first personal experience of a revolving door in this country was years back when I entered the former Mobil House building, now Total headquarters on Library Road.
While it is true that the private universities have contributed to the developmental growth of this country and therefore must be given the necessary encouragement, it must also be stressed that establishing a university is not a child’s play. Universities in this county, both public and private, should be given close marking by NAB to maintain standards. As it stands now, this country is likely to witness the collapse of many of the private universities in the near future, that is perhaps until the time when there is likely to be influx from the current crop of SHS students enjoying free education. The snag is that those students might have been used to free education to such an extent that they may not have the appetite to pay fees at the private universities.
E-mail: macgyasi@gmail.com
From Kwame Gyasi