The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) has approved over one thousand (1000) programmes for study by public universities nationwide.
According to the leadership of GTEC, the new programmes will help streamline the academic calendar of tertiary institutions.
The Director-General of GTEC, Dr Ahmed Abdulai Jinapor, disclosed that a new body would be established to monitor the approved programmes for the public universities.
“Beginning February 1, the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission will receive new applications from public institutions. However, as we accept these new programmes, there is something that is going to inform the whole practice.
“We want institutions to stay in their niche, institutions should remain in their mandate areas. Institutions cannot be doing anything and everything. The system whereby you have technology institutions that are mandated to do technology-oriented programmes, but today, doing Akan, Twi, and Dagbani, I think, should be something of the past.
“Hence, this body will ensure that you fall within your niche; the programmes must have relevance to the developmental aspirations of this country. And such programmes should not feed into saturated markets of this economy,” the Director-General of GTEC stated.
It will be recalled that the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) in 2023 suspended the processing of new accreditation applications for academic programmes from all public universities, including the technical universities, with immediate effect until January 1, 2024.
The suspension, however, did not cover the University of Environment and Sustainable Development (UESD) at Somanya in the Eastern Region.
According to GTEC, the decision is informed by the need to sanitise the accreditation space due to the persistent non-compliance by some institutions with the accreditation requirements of the country.