REGULATE PRIVATE COLLEGES

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 structures. 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.

Admission

The admission requirements are far below those generally offered by the country’s institutions. 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 territory in national tertiary institutions. Seen from this fact, government is supposed to intervene and monitor these unregulated structures offering tertiary education because their number snowballs daily.

Quality

This will in no doubt debase the country’s quality of education if we watch it passively. The boom behind all this is that the proprietors are overly concerned about raking in a lot of millions of Emalangeni from the gullible candidates. For instance, now there are a number of teacher training colleges in the country which admit aspiring teachers using this poor requirement schedule. At the end of the training programme, these graduates flock to the TSC in search of available teaching posts and are approvingly granted the jobs without further testing them if they are competent enough to teach the pupils. From where I am sitting, these colleges are a shortcut to the teaching profession, hence we have a huge number of incompetent teachers whom we expect to churn out the best pupils.

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