Centralised university applications portal must work

One traumatic experience parents and guardians of children ready for university education go through is seeking admission for their children and wards.

Currently, parents and guardians are compelled to buy admission forms of different universities and hope that the children and wards will be lucky to secure admission to at least one of them.

In cases where the applicant is offered admission to two or more universities, he or she is able to take up only one of the offers, meaning that the money spent on admission forms for the other universities goes waste, since forms bought are not returnable.

Rightly so, money obtained from the sale of admission forms becomes internally generated funds for the universities, but the situation is a drain on parents and guardians who, in their zeal to get schools for their children and wards, are forced to buy many application forms to brighten the chances of the children and wards gaining admission.

Apart from the cost burden, which can often be a barrier to many, the process of applying individually to various university is a huge inconvenience to both prospective students and their parents and guardians.

That is why the announcement that, beginning from the 2023/24 academic year, all prospective university students will apply for admission from a single platform called the Centralised Applications Processing Service (CAPS) must be good news, especially to parents.

The Director-General of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), Prof. Mohammed Salifu, who disclosed this to the Daily Graphic in an interview recently, said the commission was currently working with stakeholders to ensure that the portal was up and running for the 2023/24 academic year.

He said the GTEC had already met with vice-chancellors of the universities and relevant stakeholders on the development and was currently working with a consultant on the various technical issues.

The Daily Graphic sees this move as a positive way of resolving some of the admission challenges and wishes to urge the GTEC and vice-chancellors to ensure that the portal works.

With CAPS, as we understand it, one access code enables an applicant to apply to three universities at the same time and choose three programmes in each university.

The good thing is that with this process, if a qualified candidate applies and is not picked or does not accept any offers in the first instance, he or she can take advantage of a special arrangement called the ‘CAPS Mall’, which will operate like a shopping mall.

At the ‘mall’ will be qualified students who were not picked and universities still looking for students.

Alternatively, applicants who get offers from universities in the first instance but do not like the programmes offered them can go to the ‘mall’ to search for their preferred programmes in different universities. This, surely, is a better idea and major game changer in facilitating university admission and easing access for prospective applicants.

Prof. Salifu added another advantage of adopting the CAPS — it will bring to an end the headache of unaccredited programmes, since no unaccredited institution or programme will be allowed on the portal.

This is particularly appetising, considering the fact that there have been instances when students complete programmes of study, only for them to be told that either the programmes or the institutions themselves are not accredited.

Indeed, recently, some students became frightened when the Auditor-General released its report that two public universities were running programmes that were either unaccredited or had their accreditation expired.

We doff our hat to the pioneers of this idea, especially the immediate past Minister of Education, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, and the former Minister of State in charge of Tertiary Education, Prof. Kwesi Yankah, for their relentless effort to get to this far. We also commend the Minister for Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, for his determination to see this important reform come to fruition.

We have learnt about the heightened interest already shown by private universities and the smaller and growing public universities in particular and urge all to support the initiative for its successful implementation.

Surely, a system such as this cannot be implemented without some hiccups. It is a fact that when the GTEC begins to implement CAPS, there will be some teething problems, but they must be seen as normal, being a new programme, and with time and enough goodwill from all stakeholders, such challenges will be quickly ironed out.

The Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS), which is being implemented in the UK, a replica of which we are going to do here, was not perfect when it was rolled out. So our appeal is for cooperation and collective commitment from all to make CAPS work.