Governments all over the world have been improving their educational sector through funding programs aimed at reducing the financial burden on parents, increasing access and quality to education. The government of Ghana in 2017 switched policy to a free senior high school policy to reduce poverty by finally eliminating the financial burdens parents face in paying their children's fees. This study seeks to evaluate the appropriateness of the free senior high policy in replacing the pre-existing progressive free policy. The questionnaire survey was used to collect primary data for this study. The descriptive statistics were used in analyzing the data of this study. A total number of Two hundred (200) responses were retrieved, and out of those retrieved, 57 were females, and 143 were males. All 200 responses were usable in this study. The free senior high policy proved to put more butts on seats in helping to reduce financial burdens on parents than the pre-existing progressive free policy since nothing is paid by parents or guardians.
High academic performance in senior high education is a significant issue that concerns the government and the people of Ghana because of the huge funding the government provides to schools in the form of progressive free senior high policy. Data starting from 2011/2012 to 2016/2017 academic years were picked from the students' continuous assessment register which contains students' academic records for each academic term. Data were collated and analyzed quantitatively using the Mann Whitney U Test to compare students' academic performance during the period of government partial funding (progressive free policy) from 2014/2015 to 2016/2017 academic years forming a group and no funding period, starting from 2011/2012 to 2013/2014 academic years which formed another group. For the purpose of this study, two groups of twenty (20) students were sampled making forty (40) students in total using the systematic sampling technique. The Mann Whitney U test was used to analyze academic performance of students who benefited from funding and those that do not benefit from funding. The findings indicate that government funding (progressive free policy) has a greater impact on students' academic performance.
Since this catastrophic crisis began, learning at universities has changed to distance mode to reduce person-to-person transmission of the virus. Using a survey, the article compares the experiences of international doctoral students in this COVID crisis with the general quality of learning and their experiences with various aspects of university support. The descriptive results suggest that the overall satisfaction with the general quality of learning was quite high among both Russian-speaking and English-speaking students. There were no statistically significant differences between English-speaking and Russian-speaking doctoral students. However, there was a statistically significant difference in fields of study, with international doctoral students in medical sciences being the most dissatisfied with the general quality of learning. After comparing international doctoral students' experiences with various aspects of university support, the results further reveal that English-speaking international doctoral students were dissatisfied with access to laboratory equipment, software for working on a dissertation, and library services the most. The article advocates that universities provide and improve their support systems, especially by making laboratory equipment, software for working on dissertations, and library services more accessible to English-speaking international doctoral students during this pandemic, to give them a positive learning experience.
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