University Admissions

At present, since the university and Senior High School (SHS) academic cycles do not sync, WASSCE candidates are unable to view their results before purchasing university forms. Consequently, they are forced to buy forms for more than one university, with the hope that their SSCE results would fit into the cut-off point of at least one university. This overburdens students and parents with extra costs of purchasing and processing. During the 2013/2014 academic year, whilst 48,000 University of Ghana forms were bought at GHC130.00, only 17,000 students were admitted. At the KNUST, 42,000 forms were bought at GHC150.00 with only 10,000 admissions. The ratio of admissions in the other universities was not too different. Per our calculations, all the public universities in Ghana (could not get information on UDS and UCC) sold admission forms in excess of over 16 million Ghana Cedis. Apart from its inadvertently exploitative nature, there is also the problem of acceptance of admission. When a student gets more than one admission, he is only able to accept one; and in many cases, the decision comes too late for those on the waiting list to be considered. Moreover, admissions to Ghanaian universities cannot be deferred to the following year without first accepting and paying relevant fees.

We demand that first, if a student is unable to accept admission for some reasons, he/she should be able to defer the acceptance to the following year. Second, public universities should revert to the joint admission system as was done between 1996 and 1999 to avoid multiple purchases of forms and other duplications and thereby relieve both students and parents of unnecessary costs. We trust that the Ministry of Education and the various boards of public universities would head to these kind requests.