Wisconsin Vars honours 4 students

Public universities must be mandated to focus on programmes that will produce excellent, efficient and adequate Masters, MPhil and PhD students, the Chancellor of Wisconsin International University College, Dr Paul Kofi Fynn, has suggested.

He added that old universities such as the University of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Cape Coast University and others must also concentrate on the production of more of Masters, PhD and MPhils graduates.

“Now all the public universities are running mature student’s programmes and distance education programmes and have refused to venture into research programmes.

Already most of them are struggling with infrastructural capacity following the overpopulation of students and still continue to provide admission for undergraduate programmes,” he said.

Dr Fynn expressed these sentiments at a ceremony to award the four students who represented the university at this year’s Graphic Business Tertiary Business Sense Challenge.

The University topped the likes of University of Ghana, KNUST, Methodist University and the University of Development Studies for the second position while Cape Coast University was crowned the winner.

The management of Wisconsin gave each student a full education scholarship for their undergraduate programmes and 30 per cent discount for their Masters programmes.

The chancellor said private universities were struggling in running their institutions since the public universities were taking almost all the admission for the undergraduate programmes.

The situation, he explained was crippling private universities since most of them were struggling to even pay lecturers and other expenses.

“If the private universities are allowed to handle most of the undergraduate programmes they would be doing very well since most of them have adequate infrastructural capacity to recruit more students,” Dr Fynn said.

He applauded the government from exempting private universities from paying corporate tax and appealed to stakeholders to consider withholding tax as well.

“We appeal to the Ministry of Education to have discussions with the National Accreditation Board to speedup approval for institutional accreditation and programme accreditation since some of these approvals take at times years to get approval,” he added.

BY BERNARD BENGHAN