Universities no longer teaching - new report

What you need to know:

Business-oriented. The Committee on Education report warns that universities are more preoccupied with high student numbers without regard to quality of education

Kampala.

The troubling levels of joblessness in the country are as a result of universities churning out high numbers of graduates whose skills are not tailored to current labour market demands, says a new parliamentary probe report.

The Committee on Education report also warns that universities are lately more preoccupied with high student numbers, which means big business but without regard to delivering the much desired quality of education.

The report warns that both public and private university education is not only at the crossroads and need urgent measures to clean up the mess, but majority of their 1,800 programmes offered are also “irrelevant” to the job market.

The report indicates that some universities are getting away with the disheartening shortcomings due to a collapse in “oversight” by the National Council of Higher Education (NCHE), which is collapsing under the weight of funding challenges.
Uganda has 42 universities, with nine of them public, and 33 private. But the report by the Committee on Education says some of the universities have lost direction and their core mandate of providing quality education has been replaced by making money.

“The quality and availability of professionals for both content delivery and university management, quality assurance, physical infrastructure deficiencies, and the quality of graduates coming out of universities and the ability of universities to respond to the dynamic needs of society leaves a lot to be desired,” the report reads in part.

The committee said the assessment report is aimed at jumpstarting policy discussions on reforms of higher education but more urgently “an appropriate government response” is required. The report also recommends that budgetary allocation to the education sector be scaled upwards from the current 4.5 per cent to at least 10 per cent in line with the East African framework for higher education funding.

The State minister for Higher Education, Mr Chrysostom Muyingo, told Saturday Monitor that government is already addressing [some of] the issues raised by the MPs.

“What they raised is not new to us, and for that matter, we have been guiding these institutions, for example, on revamping their curriculums to meet the current job market, to scrap certain courses which are outdated [but it is still the same MPs who complain], and pumping money into infrastructure and enhancement of salaries of academic staff,” he said.

Mr Muyingo disagreed with the committee recommendation of stopping accrediting new universities in order to first sort out the current mess that ranges from financial to organisational and managerial.

“The government’s policy is to provide an enabling environment for all Ugandans to attain an education to the highest possible level,” he said, adding: “We do everything when we have a plan for it.”

If nothing is urgently done about these unemployment trends, the committee led by Mbale Woman MP Connie Nakayenza, warns of university education in Uganda risking to produce a “volatile pack of unskilled and jobless youngsters in a highly dependent society. They also warn that the ultimate end result for the country would be “economic stagnation or social unrest.”

Background

Unemployable. Statistics by National Planning Authority (NPA) show that at least nine in every 10 Ugandans who have completed any form of education are unemployed. The NPA research also showed that 700,000 people join the job market every year, regardless of qualification but only 90,000 get something to do, which translates into 87 per cent joblessness in the country..
Least productive. A 2010 competitiveness survey of Uganda’s labour force conducted by the ministry of Finance and the United Nations Population Fund showed that Uganda’s labour force is one of the least productive in the world.