Some university courses being offered in Ghana are "useless" and do not prepare graduates for the job market, former Education Minister Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum has said.

Speaking on the Konnected Minds podcast, Dr Adutwum criticised universities for offering programmes that lead to what he described as "a degree to nowhere," accusing institutions of prioritising enrolment numbers over national development needs.

"You have done labour needs assessment of your country. You know that the country needs more engineers, they need more medical, they need more nurses," he said. "If you don't have a labour needs assessment that you are following, then what it means is that you are just educating everyone."  The former minister cited specific programmes he considered problematic, including Development Studies at the University for Development Studies and BA in Education Non-Teaching at the University of Ghana.

"When I was the minister, I challenged universities about that. I remember going to the New Year School and I spoke about we do not need anybody to offer courses called Development Studies to study development. No, and It was being offered at UDS," he said.Dr Adutwum said the Vice Chancellor of UDS called him the day after his comments to inform him that a student had withdrawn from the programme. "I said it's good for him, it's good for him, it's good for him, because you know and I know that that course is not taking the student anywhere," he said.

He added: "They have courses called Development Education. It doesn't qualify the student to teach, and I don't know what industry, what company is going to employ students who have done Development Education."

The former minister also criticised BA in Education Non-Teaching at the University of Ghana, noting that graduates complete national service and then struggle to find employment. "They come and do their national service, and after national service, they are frustrated because nobody is hiring them. So university degree to nowhere," he said.

Dr Adutwum argued that universities are offering these courses to fill spaces and collect fees, rather than to serve the national interest.

"They are just filling up the spaces because they are coming and they are paying money to come, and the universities like it," he said.He called on the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission to step in and align university programmes with national labour needs, citing India's IT boom as a no example of what Ghana could achieve with the right approach.

"The police service needs them, the military needs them, so many companies. In case Ghanaian companies don't need them, companies abroad need them, and they will stay in Ghana and work for those," he said.

"If you don't revamp the whole education system and do education to somewhere and not education to nowhere, you cannot confront and solve your graduate unemployment problem," he added.