Abstract:
It was asserted that University and university systems around the world are faced with rapid growing demand and decreasing or static government investment (Marcucci and Johnstone, 2010). In response to this assertion, many countries introduced cost-sharing in order to preserve the quality of higher education. In order not to deny academically talented young people from poor families from accessing higher education, governments and individual institutions started offering financial assistance to needy students. For this same cause the University of Ghana established a Student Financial Aid Office (SFAO) in 2005 which aims at awarding scholarships to needy but brilliant students. Little is known about how the SFAO awards its scholarship. Many countries have adopted the means testing method to enable them target the scarce funds to only needy students. Hence the aim of this study is to develop a statistical model (a means testing statistical model) for assessing the need of a student who applies for financial aid and awarding the scholarship accordingly. A random sample of 384 undergraduate regular University of Ghana students was selected to fill a questionnaire on a wide range of questions. Factor analysis was used to extract critical factors which were used to assess the need levels of the students and responses of each respondent were scored based on weights assigned to the variables. The scores were then used to compute the Relative Need Index for every respondent; furthermore, students were categorized into five need groups according to their need levels. It was found out that only 2.7% of students sampled fell in the most needy group and 15.6% were in the least needy group. On the other hand, majority of the students were in the middle level class which are the needy and the less needy groups, constituting 23.1% and 47.3% of the total sample respectively. It was concluded that information on income is difficult to come by in our part of the world, therefore the family income component was not included in the analysis. It was also established that, even though means testing has its challenges it is adopted by countries and institutions in order to allot financial assistance to students efficiently. The developed means testing formula was recommended to the University of Ghana for adoption.
