Coronavirus: Private tertiary institutions asked to adopt income diversification

Private Tertiary Institutions (PTIs) have been advised to adopt income diversification to be financially sustainable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A research report by the Valley View University (VVU), in Accra, copied to the Ghana News Agency, said, diversifying university income could include consulting services, marketing of physical facilities, part-time degree programmes, proper financial management, and eliminating poor employee attitude.

The report said the above could increase enrolment with its resulting positive impact on the financial sustainability of institutions against the traditional system of income generation of PTIs, which was limited to fees generation.

The report sought to address concerns of finding the correlation between income diversification and financial sustainability among PTIs and to investigate means of economic sustainability approach related to income diversification.

The findings indicated that the traditional source of revenue (tuition fees) of PTIs was decreasing due to severe competitions from public educational institutions with COVID-19 highlighting the issue of excess dependence on conventional revenue sources.

“This study adopted a causal research design to study the correlation between income diversification and financial sustainability among PTIs. Among the institutions used in the Greater Accra Region, 14 (35%) were denominational, and 26 (65%) were nondenominational.

“The study was carried out in PTIs in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. 40 out of the 60 PTIs in the region were randomly sampled to answer the self-constructed questionnaires with the Cronbach Alpha of .863 for income diversification and .852 for financial sustainability,” the statement said. The report showed that there was a correlation between income diversification and financial sustainability was based on strategies to diversify income.

“The study concludes that PTIs' financial sustainability is based on strategies to diversify incomes during the COVID-19 era. Therefore the research suggests that the PTIs invest in profitable projects to diversify revenue.”

The research was conducted by Dr. Williams Kwasi Peprah, General Manager at Valley View University Ventures and a Lecturer at the School of Business and Mr Francis Osei-Kuffour, FCCA, Internal Auditor and a Lecturer at the School of Business.