Not every student who wrote the 2013 West Africa Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE) in 2013 will get admission to the university, Deputy Minister for Education, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa has said.
Speaking on Accra-based Joy FM, the Deputy Minister said a misconception had been created by the public that any other institution of higher education apart from the universities was “useless.”
Creating the understanding that government had made adequate provision for the two cohorts of Senior High School (SHS) graduates who wrote the 2013 WASSCE, Mr Okudzeto Ablakwa said the situation of having a backlog of SHS graduates failing to enter the few public universities in the country was because of the impression that it is only the universities that could offer them the type of education they sought for.
He said, “The first challenge I have is the presumption that everybody who writes the SSCE exams should go to the university. There is a fundamental problem to that. We are building a country which needs very critical human resource in various spheres as we develop. We should not create the impression that it is only the universities that offers that opportunity that if you complete senior high school and you do not go to the university you are useless. I think that that kind of mindset ought to change.”
“We have polytechnics, they are very important and very soon they will become technical universities. We need that vocational engineering training for that critical middleman power,” he added.
“If we speak as if its only universities which matter then we will have the situation where perhaps only chaffs will look at colleges of education as a last resort and they will not be motivated enough to contribute to training our young ones to become quality manpower as we deserve.”
