The never-ending quest for a magic bullet to our development challenges
Emilly C. Maractho (PhD)
What you need to know:
- Will government harmonise admission fees across universities?
It must be fascinating for those who are in the business of trying to understand problems these days. They can never be bored. Most times, we must see problems as one thing and one thing alone.
As such, the solution must also come as one thing no matter what. When I read about the centralized admission system to universities, I was initially amused. Then I realized that, if you work for a private university, you may think that it is a joke while those who are in public universities may not care much, and even consider it innovative.
Others will not even notice or bother with it all together. One must admire the thinking behind this apparently innovative thinking. There are many problems to be cured, it is argued. These range from the youthful population that is growing at a rapid speed, unemployment as a result of that growing population, mismatch of skills, multiple admissions for individuals who are not decided, and different standards among other problems.
And the cure for all these problems is a single admissions system. Wouldn’t it be nice to have such a magic bullet that once shot many things fall in line? Imagine come July 1st this year, the one-stop admission centre is implemented, in three years there will be jobs for everyone who graduates with a relevant skill set, there will be no hanging skills and everyone admitted to university reports, while a unified standard for admissions in both private and public universities works wonders. There are times I try to look at a problem from every angle possible.
I listen to various groups talk about what the issues are. Never satisfied with a single narrative, I have the habit of turning a problem upside down before deciding that I understand it. I wonder why it is easy for people to identify so many problems only to imagine there is a single solution, a sort of magic bullet to address them. For instance, the idea that a skills mismatch can in part be addressed by a central admissions system is only half the truth.
A skills mismatch implies that there are so many jobs available but few people with relevant skills exist. So you have too many people hanging around with skills but without jobs, and so many jobs waiting for the right skills. The reality is that the jobs are just too few, skills or no skills and not enough is done to create jobs that meet the needs of that generation.
The assumption is that a central admissions system will only give admissions for programmes that meet the national development skills needs. What then happens to the interests of learners? What happens to the national council for higher education and the numerous programmes accredited across universities that facilitate this skills mismatch? Will the system simply ignore them or they have to be scrapped off by government? It would be interesting to find out why people attend private universities.
There must be several reasons, some good and others not so good. For instance, some attend private universities because they can afford, others because they did not make the high cut off points in public universities but performed well, and others still, because they just prefer the universities as a result of niche areas developed. For instance, some will go to private university x because they think a particular program is best offered there.
I remember the time we thought that our problems in primary education would end if we paid science teachers better than those of arts? It was the root of all the same problems we are discussing today – unemployment, producing skills not needed by the job market, and universities accrediting ‘useless programmes’. Paying science teachers better would motivate them, produce more scientists and get us on the road to the industrial age.
There are many questions to think about. Will government harmonise admission fees across universities? Probably yes. Will the programmes be the same across private and public universities? Again probably yes. And, will tuition fees be comparative and competitive across public and private universities? What practical steps may need to be taken before a centralized admissions system is implemented? What are the economic fundamentals for us to address the twin challenges of a high population growth and low employment opportunities?
It would be interesting to get insights into these. Maybe, as a starting point, it’s useful to start with two systems, one for private universities and another for public universities. And if we must see the solution as one thing only, then it must be to apply it to public universities only, unless government is also going to harmonise everything else, including tuition and salaries across universities.
Emilly Comfort Maractho, PhD.
Associate Professor of Media Studies
[email protected]
