A large number of students who attend the University of Memphis in the United States of America might be forced to return to their home country, Ghana, myjoyonline.com reported yesterday.
University of Memphis President, Bill Hardgrave, the report continued, joined Action News 5’s Better Memphis show on Wednesday, last week, to speak on the status of his students.
Bill Hardgrave is quoted as saying that the students are sponsored by the government of Ghana, which has not paid the students’ tuition yet.
The students will have until August 9, 2025 to find a way to make the payment, or they will have to vacate the country, according to the Daily Memphian newspaper.
“I think there was a regime change in Ghana and that affected the budget, but we are hopeful that it gets corrected because we love to keep those students on campus”, Hardgrave reportedly said.
The Daily Memphian newspaper also reported that Ghana owes the University of Memphis $3.6 million and called on those willing to help to donate to the Gary Shorb International Student Support Fund.
The primary objectives of the Ghana Scholarship Secretariat are to award scholarships to brilliant but needy Ghanaian students, particularly in areas of national priority and to support qualified Ghanaian workers’ training in foreign tertiary institutions. The aim of the government is to also develop human resources for national growth and development by providing these scholarships and bursaries to the needy students.
But despite this clear mandate of awarding the scholarship to brilliant students, especially to undertake courses considered as national priority in foreign universities, the authorities appear to have veered off this trajectory and doing the opposite.
Early last year, it came out that students were being offered foreign scholarships to study humanities.
In our opinion, the public universities in Ghana – University of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, University of Cape Coast, University of Health and Allied Sciences, University for Development Studies and a host of others offer courses that cover every sector of the Ghanaian economy.
But despite the existence of these universities and the various courses they are offering, the government of Ghana is still paying huge sums of money to cover tuition fees and pocket money of students who are sent abroad on annual basis by the Scholarship Secretariat, to undertake courses that can easily be pursued here in Ghana.
It is important to stress that at the time Kwame Nkrumah’s government came out with the idea of sending our students abroad to go and study and return to help in the development of the critical sectors of the national economy, most of the courses our students are rushing to undertake abroad were not available in our universities.
After 68 solid years of our existence as a nation, the situation has dramatically changed. Now students from the English speaking countries in West Africa are now coming to Ghanaian universities to study. Regrettable, we are still holding on to the old mentality and sending students abroad to go and study at the expense of the tax payer, instead of paying the same money to Ghanaian universities for them to study here.
What has even driven us crackers is the fact that the reputation of Ghana is being sullied in the advanced countries where these students are studying, due to our chronic failures to pay their tuition fees on time.In the myjoyonline.com story we earlier referenced, theUniversity of Memphis authorities are threatening to sack the students and possibly deport them, if the government of Ghana fails to redeem her indebtedness to the university – what a disgrace!
We understand that the non-payment of the tuition fees is not limited to the University of Memphis alone and that the same story is being told in other universities in the USA, UK and other places. If we, as a state, know we cannot pay the tuition fees of the students, why still maintain the policy of sending them abroad to go and study?
In our view, it is high time the government took a second look at the foreign scholarship policy, which we insist, has outlived its usefulness. Enough of the humiliation Ghana is being subjected to. Since our universities have the capacity to train students in the various fields of endeavour, the country must pull the break on this foreign scholarship madness and rather concentrate on our universities.
Nigerians, Sierra Leoneans, Gambians, Liberians and others pride themselves as having attended universities in Ghana and yet we, Ghanaians, are running away from them? No, this should not be allowed to happen and that is why we are still insisting that the foreign scholarship policy should be abolished.
