Policy and Practices of Enrollment in Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis among Public Higher Education Institutions of Ethiopia

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.