“Is Ghana’s higher education system delivering value to graduate students?”: A comparison of foreign trained to in-country trained university lecturers in the private university system

Abstract

This study seeks to determine whether the graduate higher educational sector in Ghana is providing a sufficiently high quality of education for its clients, namely, the graduate students who eventually become lecturers. The research questions tackled by the study are: Are foreign trained lecturers working in Ghana’s private higher education sector more effective than locally lecturers with regards to teaching quality and ability to earn promotion in a 5- year period? Can any differences found between the two different workers be tied to their educational background and in particular to whether they were trained abroad? To answer these questions, the research employs an exploratory design and employs data collected using both qualitative and quantitative techniques from a sample of 120 students, 6 lecturers, 3 heads of academic departments and 3 human resource department heads in three private higher institutions in Accra. The principal finding is that foreign trained lecturers are more effective than locally trained lecturers in terms of teaching quality, research output and ability to earn a promotion in a 5-year period in two of the institutions (A and B) whilst the locally trained lecturer in Institution C was found to more effective in teaching quality. This findings implies that governmental policies must be implemented to encourage the repatriation of foreign trained workers to enhance economic growth. This would be achieved through their increased productivity, as well as, spill overs such as increasing the productivity of locally trained workers through transmission of knowledge and skills.