Varsities should tap into Carnegie Mellon model

Editor, RE: “Govt to place management of student loans, bursaries under education council” (The New Times, January 11). I support this move to empower High Education Council (HEC) to take on the student loans programme; thanks to the minister to spearhead more streamlining initiatives in the education sector. I would like however to kindly request the Ministry of Education to put emphasis on the issue of quality of university programmes and their market relevancy. For instance, all universities currently give Bachelor’s in IT, which is out of sync with technology trends. I perused the University of Rwanda website, and the School of ICT has three degree programmes. Going through the curriculum one sees some overlaps/too broad generalisations. Rwanda is fortunate to have Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Kigali, which has impressive world rankings. In 2015, CMU was No 5 in the world in Computer Science and Information Systems programs. The CMU IT programme design and relevancy could be a strong factor towards this international ranking. I am certainly not advocating for copy-paste because Rwanda has her own unique dynamics/challenges, but an appropriate IT program needs to be developed and implemented across both public and private universities. This is where HEC’s major responsibility lies. This is not limited to IT programs but across the board, for instance, business programs. Let me recall the recent clinical officers undergraduate program where there was confusion if it is equivalent to a medical doctor’s program. There are already government institutions that have skills gap studies—such as Mifotra, National Commission of Science and Technology, Ministry of Youth and ICT—and HEC should build on these available studies. There are educational trends facilitated by the internet that could be considered in our university curriculum. Currently, the world has been totally sold to the concept of massive open online courses which present developing countries a golden chance to catch up with the rest of the world in our higher education by tapping into far superior educational resources at a cost of internet connectivity.I will go out on a limb and propose that students should have an option to take such MOOC (massive open online courses) from recognized MOOC providers like Coursera, Udacity, Edx...which can be verified by the universities and recognized by HEC. Mineduc is rightly focusing on the lower levels of school; currently primary school enrollment is the highest in Africa (approx. 97%), according to Unicef. IT would be tragic to get all those kids in school only to fail them at university level with programs that do not meet the market demand, hence resulting in unemployment. Kigali Girl

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Varsities should tap into Carnegie Mellon model