WINDOW OF HOPE, INDEED (JAN 26, 2011)

FOR quite some time now senior high school (SHS) graduates have had to stay at home for at least one year before entering the public universities in the country.
That is because while the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) is written in May/June of any ensuing year, the academic year for the public universities begins in September, for which reason they close admissions in March.
Therefore, SHS leavers are forced to mark time until the following year when they can buy the admission forms of the universities to put the process of gaining admission to the institutions in motion.
It is against this backdrop that the declaration by Vice-Chancellors, Ghana (VCG), the umbrella body of the heads of our public universities, that this year, final-year SHS students will be given the opportunity to gain admission to the various public universities comes as welcome relief.
The universities say they are going to offer this opportunity to this year’s SHS leavers by delaying admissions, so that the leavers can purchase admission forms, fill and submit them immediately the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) releases their results.
The WAEC will also play its part by making sure that it releases the results early to enable the students to complete the filling of the admission forms.
When all these go according to plan, then the public universities will begin the 2011/2012 academic year in late September or early October.
The Daily Graphic wholeheartedly welcomes this move to do away with the one-year waiting period that had hitherto become the norm before SHS leavers could get admission to the public universities.
Apart from the fact that the one-year waiting period prolonged the number of years our youth spent in school, which, in itself, defeated one of the aims of the educational reforms of 1987 of cutting down the number of years spent in school, there were other negative effects of the delay.
It is said that many female SHS leavers waiting to gain admission to tertiary institutions became pregnant, while some of the boys fell into bad company, with its concomitant effects, such as drug use, Internet fraud, stealing, etc.
Now that it is going to be possible for SHS leavers to go to university in October after writing their examination in May/June, it is our hope that our students will work harder than before, so that they can take advantage of this new window of hope opened to them.
Until now, the common perception among many SHS final-year students was to relax in their studies because they knew they had a whole year within which to re-write the WASSCE (if they didn’t do well at the first attempt) before they could fill university admission forms.
The Daily Graphic takes its hat off to the stakeholders who have agreed to bring about this innovation — Vice Chancellors, Ghana, the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service — and prays that they sustain the programme into the future to make the one-year waiting a thing of the past.
After all, that was the situation before the education reforms brought about two batches of secondary school leavers — sixth formers and SHS — to compel the university authorities to adopt the one-year waiting policy.