The King of the Asante Kingdom, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II has condemned as incomprehensible, the institution of admission quotas by Medical and Law Schools in Ghana, denying qualified students their rightful and entitled access to tertiary education.
The General Legal Council (GLC), the body in charge of legal education in Ghana, in 2021 instituted a 50% pass mark to manage the number of entries into the Ghana School of Law after a protracted impasse about the criteria for admission.
Annually, thousands sit for the entrance exam, however, only a few hundred are able to make it. There are unsubstantiated speculations that some students are deliberately failed.
A few of such students with the financial means are forced to further their education outside the country.
Addressing this concern while delivering a thought-provoking speech on the country’s education system at the University of Cape Coast (UCC) in the Central Region on September 5, 2024, Otumfuo condemned the act and called for considerable reappraisal at the tertiary level to fully align to the needs of society.
He observed that the scarcity of the very professionals the country is in high need of is deliberately fashioned and thereby unacceptable.
“I find it incomprehensible that we have deliberately capped the number of students our universities should admit for medicine and law even though we have a huge vacancy of doctors and a body number of students who have met all requirements for qualifying standards. We have the absurd situation in which parents of Ghanaian students have to find foreign exchange to send their children to Europe and other places to study medicine and law and they return to be employed by the Ghana Health Service.”
He urged the relevant authorities to remove the caps to admit as many as are qualified in these critical institutions.
“Assuming there are some impediments to increasing the intake of students, will it not make more sense to remove those impediments for all qualifying students to gain admission and perhaps offer space for foreign students who will pay in foreign currency?”
Source: Manhyia Palace
