A bold solution to address law school admission backlog

"Some people see things as they are and ask why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?" - George Bernard Shaw

The demand for legal education in Ghana has increased over the past decade, and despite the increase in admissions to the Ghana School of Law (GSL, aka Makola) since 2020, many students are still waiting to secure a spot into the two-year professional law programme.

This year's numbers are staggering - out of 5,000 students who took the Law School Entrance Examination, only 1,441 made the cut, leaving 3,559 students to try again next year. Additionally, approximately 1,500 students completing their Bachelor of Law (LLB) program in 2025 will join the waiting list.

Admissions into the Ghana School of Law (GSL) have become extremely competitive with the entrance exams posing a significant barrier to many aspiring law professionals. I am aware of some individuals who have been attempting to pass the exam since 2017.

This is affecting the mental health of affected students. A country that has its retirement age at 60 cannot afford to allow its citizens wanting to study law to spending seven years just to pass an entrance exams. The situation has become so dire that some parents with deep pockets are opting to send their children to the UK and Gambia, where they can pursue professional legal education at a hefty cost of around GBP 35,000 and USD 20,000 per year respectively, covering tuition and living expenses.

For those who cannot afford to go abroad, their fate has become the story recorded in John 5: 1-9 where a man waited for 38 years for his healing at the Pool of Bethesda and never made it until one day Jesus came and his story changed. This is what lots of LLB graduates have been going through. Clearly, this is a neglected crisis.

History tells us that crises do not by themselves go without a deliberate attempt to resolve them. We may bury our heads like the proverbial ostrich and pretend this is not a problem. Not making it through the entrance exams does not mean one lacks the capacity to study at the Law School. Some of the students who go to Gambia or Nigeria because they are not successful with the entrance exam have been topping their graduating class.

Recommendations

Addressing the crisis in Ghana's legal education requires a pivotal first step: amending the Legal Profession (Professional and Post-Call Law Course) (Amendment) Regulations, 2020, to introduce a new category of students, dubbed the Hybrid Track system and fee-paying student option as a way of expanding access to legal education.

Adopt a hybrid track

The first approach is to adopt a Hybrid Track. Those who will be admitted under the Hybrid Track system will pursue the programme for three years instead of the current two-year duration.

The first two years will be virtual with students taking three subjects each year and the final year can be on campus. The Hybrid Track students will take 3 subjects in their first year, another 3 subjects in their second year and the final four subjects will be taken in the third and final year.

Under this hybrid system, students will attend in-person lectures and tutorials when the regular students are on break (July to October). There is more that we can learn from the free SHS Programme concerning the capacity utilisation of teaching and learning facilities.

The quality of learning is not diminished if it is made virtual. When the covid-19 struck, the whole world including the GSL shifted from brick and wall to Zoom. I am reliably informed that some lecturers at the GSL sometimes use Zoom for lectures.

The University of Law in the UK where some of the Ghanaian LLB holders go to do their professional law programme has 100% track and if these students can be accepted into the GSL Post-Call Programme, then we should not downplay the efficacy of the hybrid proposal.

The hybrid track will require the recruitment of new lecturers and the adoption of education technology platforms like Blackboard or Canvas. Through the deployment of best practices in delivering distance education, we can enhance the learning experience for the students under the hybrid track.

The over 4000 students who are waiting to enter the GSL cannot wait for new lecture rooms to be built across the country before the question of space can be addressed.

The fact is that the constraints on physical infrastructure cannot be resolved swiftly, given the limited resources and stalled progress on the Law Village Project since its inception in 2021. If we can deploy these emergency measures for three years, we can clear the backlog, and reform the legal education system as it has been proposed by Maxwell Opoku Agyeman.

Fee-Paying Option

Secondly, instead of allowing LLB holders to travel to Gambia and the United Kingdom to pay hard currencies for their professional law programme, the GSL should be allowed the GSL to admit students who were not successful in the Entrance Exams as fee-paying, based on fees determined by the GLC. This will help reduce the pressure on the Cedi.

We cannot continue to haemorrhage our hard-earned forex exchange to UK and Gambia. Again, the income from the fee-paying students will help the GSL to get resources to improve teaching and learning.

For more than 25 years, public universities have quota for fee-paying students. This has improved the quantum of their internally generated funds and has allowed the admission of students who meet the minimum admission criteria to be admitted.

Conclusion

In the long run, we will need to have a broader conversation about the future of legal education in the country. The UK, whose legal system and education framework Ghana modelled its own after, has undergone significant structural reforms. These reforms can transform the country's educational governance, incorporating pluralism and addressing issues of access and fairness.

In the long run, we should make the legal education a single transaction. That is the LLB and BL should be merged to allow LLB holders an automatic admission into the Professional Law Programme.

This will bring about predictability to students who want to study law in the country. It will be good that a Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Education is set up to look into this. We can make this to work if we are willing.

NB: The writer is a competition economist and a lawyer. He is the West Africa Regional Director of CUTS International. He can be contacted via email: apa@cuts.org or www.cuts-accra.org