Access to undergraduate education is an unresolved burden in Ghana: A qualitative approach

Abstract

Higher education is a means by which human capital is mostly developed and awareness is created in people to think of themselves as active citizens willing and able to have influence in public life, and with the critical capacity to weigh evidence before speaking and acting. The rationale behind the paper is to address the low access to higher education in Ghana, and to emphasise the need to deal with the issue, if Ghana wants to maintain its middle-income status and be heading towards a developed country. Therefore, the paper re-examines the challenges of undergraduate education access in Ghana by intentionally selecting some educationists and engaging them in an interview. Financial challenges, infrastructural deficiency and inadequate lecturers are found to be some of the challenges. The contributions of the paper to knowledge include development of educational access conceptual framework. It is recommended that funding arrangements be pursued for students, technologically mediated distance education be effected and more research graduates be produced to augment the teaching capacity base.

Keywords:

• Access
• educational access
• higher education
• policy
• Ghana