The reports released today by the national council for higher education indicate that the status of higher education in Uganda is still wanting which has led to poor standards of products passed out by the institutions.
Reading the
report findings today in Kampala, the executive director national council for
higher education, Prof. Mary Okwakor
said, the report note that there has been a slight increase in higher education
students’ enrolment although there was a decline in foreign students.
Important to note is that there is an
improvement in enrolment in Other Tertiary Institutions, which indicates
appreciation of middle cadre courses necessary for economic development.
Overall,
higher education has registered improvements in some areas such as lecture and
laboratory space, computer access and study materials among others.
There are
some challenges such as funding for research and the heavy dependency on
tuition fees but can be gradually resolved.
Generally, the statistics show that 26,1078
students got enrolled into higher education institutions. This was slightly
higher than the 259,027 enrolled in 2016/17. There was a slight improvement in
GER from 6.82% in 2016/2017 to 6.85%. This can be explained by the increase in
the number of accredited institutions from 236 in 2017/18 to 240.
Regarding
infrastructure in Higher Education Institutions, there was a slight increase of
lecture room space from 323,158 square metres in 2016/17 to 324,270 square
metres, resulting in space per student of 1.24 square metres which is
acceptable according to the NCHE quality assurance capacity indicators.
Library
space increased from 86,068 square metres to 91,366 square metres and space per
student increased slightly from 0.33 to 0.35 square metres, however this
remains unacceptable according to NCHE capacity indicators.
Statistics
show that whereas the number of teaching staff who enrolled for PhDs in 2017/18
increased from 674 to 682, the number of staff who enrolled for Masters Programmes
reduced from 657 in 2016/17 to 627 in 2017/18.
However,
despite the challenges mentioned above, there is room for improvement and it is
anticipated that NCHE and all stakeholders will work together with the Ministry
of Education to improve institutional infrastructure, human resource including
teaching and none teaching staff to ensure quality in higher institutions of
Learning.
Higher
education should be looked at as one of the contributors to national
transformation and accordingly be given priority. Government should endeavour
to support this sector by always allocating adequate resources and subsidies to
the private higher education institutions, given that the costs of running HEIs
are generally high.
Okwakor further says this has greatly
affected higher education standards in Uganda.
While
launching the reports, the minister in charge of higher education, J.C.Muyingo asked all stakeholders to
think of new ways on how best higher education can be improved if the country
is to regain her rankings globally.
He also
castigates universities that are teaching students like secondary schools. Muyingo now says such universities
should be closed.
Meanwhile, Administrators
of some of the universities are calling for better policies and friendly environment
for the universities to operate coupled with support from government in terms
of funding to help lift off the burden of over dependence on tution collected
from students.
The two
reports launched include, the tracer study for graduates which discusses
enrollment and employment of graduates on an annual basis and the state of
higher education and training in Uganda 2017/18.
The findings
were conducted from April 2018 across the country.