GOVT MUST SAFEGUARD TERTIARY EDUCATION

Sir,

The rapidly increasing number of colleges operating in the country is unprecedented. The mushrooming number of these colleges is due to the absence of government’s hard-line policy to regulate the operating licences of these institutions.

Unfortunately, this helter-skelter of the emerging colleges will impact negatively on the tertiary education system offered by the kingdom if government sleeps on the job because most of these colleges do not follow certain legal procedures. Social media is frequently abuzz with decorative adverts from such colleges seeking to validate their status as globally competitive institutions.

This has been going on for some time but the lowdown is that the admission procedures are a shocker. The admission requirements are far below those generally offered by the country’s other institutions of higher learning. Usually these colleges accept a minimum of three passes in the following category; D, E. Conversely, English is not a basic requirement in these private colleges, which is a subject that goes with the territory in national tertiary institutions.

Government should intervene and monitor these unregulated institutions because their number is snowballing daily. This will in no doubt debase the country’s education quality if we watch passively.

The boom behind all this is that the proprietors are overly concerned about raking in a lot of millions from gullible candidates. For instance, there are various teacher training colleges in the country which admit aspiring teachers using a poor requirement schedule. At the end of the training programme, the graduates flock the TSC in search of available teaching posts and are granted jobs without further testing them if they are competent enough to teach.

These colleges are a shortcut to the teaching profession; hence we have a huge number of incompetent teachers who we expect to churn out the best pupils. These teachers will contribute to the high number of failures that schools record yearly.

We need our government to tighten the screws in a bid to regulate and monitor the number of private colleges that snowball each and every day. Emakolishi sekwaba nguthela wayeka, kahleni bekunene, we need quality tertiary education and the strong urge to rake in a lot of money should not interfere with government’s mandate of offering a high level of tertiary education.

Simanga Shabangu

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