The Vice-Chancellor of the Sunyani Technical University (STU), Professor Kwadwo Adinkrah-Appiah, has appealed to the government to develop a deliberate policy that prepares students at the basic level to take up science, technology and engineering programmes at the tertiary level.
He contended that if the students entered tertiary institutions with qualifications that did not allow them to read science, technology and engineering programmes, “we cannot do much.”
Human resource development
“So, we need to go back to the basics and put in place deliberate policies to get the children to develop the appetite for science-related programmes to qualify them to read such programmes at the tertiary level,” Prof. Adinkrah-Appiah proposed at the ongoing 71st New Year School and Conference at the University of Ghana, Legon.
He was speaking in a panel discussion on the topic, “Ghana Beyond Aid: Human Capital Development, Research and other innovations.”
Prof. Adinkrah-Appiah expressed concerns that polytechnics and technical universities were always accused of running more humanity programme, stressing that even though the STU had more science, technology and engineering as well as technical vocational education training (TVET) programmes, it was still struggling to get students into those programmes.
“But the few business programmes that we introduced, you see the number of students coming for that direction and of course, because we also need internally generated funds to run the system, we pick them,” he explained.
Deliberate move
“So, we really need a deliberate effort to make sure that majority of our students qualify to read the science-related programmes,” he said, adding that if the student was not good in Mathematics, he or she could not read engineering or any of the science-related programmes.
He said there should be a policy direction that would create incentives to attract the youth into such programmes and there should be a deliberate effort to push the majority of the youth into the engineering, science and technology field.
