Train People For Jobs

Persistent complaints about the country’s universities’ failure to adequately equip graduates with relevant skills for the world of work, have come under attack.
A former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Legon, Prof. Akilakpa Sawyer, says the complaints are ill-informed, misplaced and populist.
The purpose of university education, he said, is to prepare people for work not to train them for specific jobs.
“The question of curriculum relevance is often crowded in populism. I do not think it is the university’s function to prepare its students for a particular assignment; the function is to broaden their minds; educate them about how to acquire knowledge, and give them values which ensure [that] whatever they do after the university, they bring to their task, skills, insights, values which they wouldn’t have had otherwise,” he said.
Prof. Sawyer is afraid the country’s universities are being pressurized into becoming vocational institutions.
“It is true that our graduates need to have jobs,” he said, but added, “it is not the university’s function to train them for jobs; absolutely not! It is to educate them for work, not train them for jobs. For example if you get a degree in Agriculture, it doesn’t make you a good farmer.”
Prof. Sawyer was speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show Monday on the quality of education in the country.
He said the increasing numbers of students in the university has put the quality of education under constant threat.
Demand for education, he believes, must be balanced with the need for higher quality because “it is not good enough to simply have large numbers in the institutions; if the teaching is bad and the research is poor, what do we get?”
According to him, the education authorities must adopt technology to help mitigate the problem of increasing demand for higher education which is impeded by inadequate resources to expand educational facilities to meet the demands.
The retired educationist recommended distance education as the surest way out. He debunked assertions that the quality of education is compromised if the distance learning module is adopted, insisting the module had been used successfully elsewhere.