Lady Christabel George-Didia, a nominee for a public commission in Nigeria, says that the Bachelor's degree she acquired from a KNUST affiliate in Ghana turned out to be a scam.

Over the last couple of years, stories about "degree mills", "fraudulent certificates", and "fake universities" linked to Ghana have been appearing regularly in mainstream and social media in Nigeria.

I understand that this has contributed to a significant drop in the number of Nigerians trooping to Ghana for higher education.

So much so that some Ghanaian private universities that had come to depend quite a bit on the proceeds from the earlier boom in educational tourism are said to be facing financial challenges. Apparently, Nigerian students were a major driver of that boom.

Ghana seems to have taken the brand appeal of its higher-ed offering for granted and watched it all fritter away through demarketing.

After peaking in 2014 at over 17,000 students, international student enrolment has dropped to ~5000.

Considering that foreign students paid far more than local students and in dollars, the decline has hit private unis badly. One such uni used to rely on international students for ~1/2 its income.

Public unis, faced with significant revenue pressures of another sort, have been ramping up enrolment at an unbelievable rate.

The largest university, KNUST, already has ~90,000 students. More than any equivalent uni in, say, the UK. It is also almost 20% bigger than the biggest university in the US, Arizona State.

More fascinating than its absolute enrolment size is the trend in KNUST's admissions. This year, it received almost 93000 applications. It made more than 50,000 offers, and will likely enroll ~27,000. At this pace, the university will hit about 130,000 students by 2030 if its yield continues to grow. It would likely become the 2nd or 3rd largest university in Africa, behind only South Africa's UNISA, whose numbers have been swelled by open/distance education.

In that sense, one may argue that Ghanaian universities have barely any space left over to worry about international students. Except that, as I have explained: a) public unis are so heavily subsidised in Ghana that they will never worry about numbers, the locals will always come in droves. b) Having more full fee-paying foreigners, however, can help cross-subsidise the locals, taking some of the pressure off government subsidies. c) And, perhaps, the aggressive enrolment rates in places like KNUST, even as private unis struggle to attract enough students, suggests an imbalance that may eventually start to strain the entire system. d) Last but not least, the competitiveness of the Ghanaian higher-ed offering is best gauged by the attraction it holds for those who are willing to pay extra and travel all the way to sample it.

International students may thus play an ecological role in the system more important than is suggested by their numbers alone.