Public universities will soon collapse - UG Vice Chancellor

There is eminent close down of most of the country's public universities due to poor remuneration lecturers and other teaching staff are receiving, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana (UG), Prof. Ebenezer Oduro Owusu has predicted.

“More top universities will collapse since a gradient will be set up with people moving from the top universities to smaller universities because conditions are the same everywhere,” he noted.

According to him, there could not be an equal measure for all universities in the country, adding that “lumping universities together doesn’t help because their functions are not the same and their lines of responsibilities and specializations vary”.

"Ghana is having about 240 tertiary institutions, we cannot lump all of them together and say we are going to have unified conditions of service for all of them. When you do that you are punishing certain universities and giving undue advantage to others", Prof. Oduro Owusu spoke when the acting secretary of the National Accreditation Board (NAB), Dr. Kingsley Nyarko, paid a courtesy call on him.

The Vice Chancellor emphasized that most countries in the world have top-notch universities that promote them on the global stage hence Ghana can also emulate the concept.

“Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are the pride of the US and the UK can equally boast of Oxford University and Cambridge as one of the top universities”

He said the top rank universities were the face of the country and so there was the need to maintain that.