| Abstract: | Higher education instills relevant knowledge and advanced skills and supplies the human
resources required for leadership, management, business and professional positions. This
quantitative study aimed at making comparative analysis among higher education institutions
in Ethiopia in terms of implementing 70/30 professional and program mix intake policy using
cross-sectional survey research design. Both public and private higher education institutions
were selected using availability sampling technique. For the purpose of comparison 32 public
universities were selected and grouped into 1st, 2nd and 3rd generations on the basis of their
years of establishment. The actual mean intake of each generation was manually calculated,
processed using SPSS and compared with policy standard. In addition to descriptive statistics
like frequency and percentage, inferential statistics such as one sample and paired sample Ttests
were used to analyze the data. The findings of the study show that though net entry rate
has been increasing, there is a wider gap between policy and practice in implementing 70:30
policy among the three generations of public higher education institutions and their respective
bands with high enrollment to Natural Sciences and Technology fields, but with dwindling
intake into Humanities and Social Science fields. The study disclosed low share of private
enrollment, imbalance of gender, graduation and enrollment rates in higher education
institutions. While public higher education institutions give priority to Sciences, Engineering
and Technology fields, private higher education institutions mainly focus on Business, Social
Sciences and Humanities. To narrow the gap between policy and practices, universities and
national students‘ placement offices need to work closely, and carefully consider the national
intake policy and align their intake with the country‘s future human power requirements.
Strong link and collaboration needs to be established between government and nongovernment
institutions to fairly benefit from reforms introduced at different times. Low
achieving and female students need to get necessary support so as to minimize imbalance of
gender, and to improve enrollment and graduation rates in public higher learning institutions.
Since social sciences fields can help in combating contemporary global challenges like
corruption, terrorism, problem of good governance and other social disorders, universities
need to heighten their priority towards this field. |
