Fleecing Foreign Students

The story of Trans Africa University College, Accra, as reported in yesterday's edition of this paper, is heartbreaking.

It casts a shadow over the integrity and efficiency of the appropriate public institution charged with regulating such tertiary schools to ensure that high standards of education are maintained.

Hundreds of students from neigbouring countries, especially Nigeria, hungry for tertiary education, have come to Ghana to acquire higher academic certificates. They come in their droves obviously sure that local authorities would protect their interests by ensuring that quack schools do not fleece them.

Like private hospitals, tertiary institutions in the non-public sector should be regulated as an effective means of protecting standards and closing the door to quacks.

Unfortunately, many of these students have found themselves in schools which have no accreditation for the courses they (schools) claim to be running. Some of these schools as in the case of the one under review, lack the requisite quality of lecturers among other deficiencies, yet they advertise themselves in the media and on the internet under the full glare of the germane regulatory institution.

Some of the victims of the anomaly told DAILY GUIDE that they learnt about the school on the net following which their parents parted with so much money so they could come and study here. Now their dreams have been shattered, having spent so much money with nothing to show for the expenditure.

Recently, the National Accreditation Board (NAB) published names of tertiary institutions accredited to run various courses. Unfortunately, such advertisements were limited to Ghana as a result of which only students in this country had access to the eye-opening information. Many Ghanaian students know which private tertiary institutions they should turn to and rarely fall into the hands of the quack ones. Not so with the foreign students who have fallen into the grips of unaccredited tertiary institutions.

Ghana stands to gain tremendously from educational tourism if the appropriate regulation of tertiary institutions is undertaken by the germane body.

Thousands of foreign students are studying in this country with fees which can provide a fresh source of taxes to government. Without an efficient regulation to weed out non-conforming schools however, we cannot derive such dividends.

How often does the NAB inspect schools it has accredited and those it has not? It would be instructive to also find out what whip it has at its disposal to crack in the case of schools not qualified to operate.

The story about Trans Africa University College has brought up a number of pertinent questions. While the school claims to have an affiliation with the University of Education, Winneba, the public tertiary institution, denies any such linkage.

We view it offensive and criminal that a school would lay claim to attributes it does not have yet nothing in the form of sanctions are being meted out to it.

By this commentary we are calling on the sector ministry to wade into the mushrooming of quack tertiary institutions in the country lest the country's educational institutions earn a bad name.