Tag: varsities’

In the last couple of years, there has been an explosion of candidates seeking admission into universities at home and abroad – especially public varsities. The reason for this is not farfetched as access to university education has become vital in Nigeria as  a  result  of  an  increase  in  the  college-age population and an awareness of the role university education play in the  development  of  the  individual  as  well  as  the nation.

While this in itself should be a positive development, there is a snag. The physical infrastructure and the academic staff that would have made it possible to admit large numbers of students’ are in dire strait; in essence, most of our varsities lack carrying capacities. That, however, is one side of the story.

On the flip side, private varsities have not been able to fill the quota allotted to them by the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB).  At a meeting with the Committee of Vice Chancellors (CVC) and Registrars of Private Universities, the Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Dibu Ojerinde disclosed that the private universities admitted 19,254 candidates as against 67,009 allotted quota in 2013. According to him this does not speak well of this group of institutions in terms of ratio admissions to allocated quota.

It does not take a prophet to discern why there is this lopsided development – public varsities stretched to their limits and private varsities unable to fill their quotas. It all boils down to resources. How many indigent parents have the resources to send their children to private varsities in Nigeria given the high fees charged? This is the singular reason there are enormous pressure on public varsities which tremendously affects their carrying capacities.

Carrying capacity of institutions refers to the maximum number of students that an institution can sustain for quality education available based on human and material resources. However, over-enrollment is a common practice. Most institutions do not abide by their carrying capacity for reasons best known to them. This is often the reason why some students sit outside lecture halls and some on window sills in order to receive lectures. Without mincing words, our institutions are overcrowded, and this, no doubt seriously affects the type of education our undergraduates get.

Let’s get down to some figures here. In the 2010/2011 academic session, cumulatively, we had 112 varsities and 1,493, 611 applicants. Out of this number, the carrying capacity was only 450,000 or 30.13 per cent of applicants. We should note the fact that most of the “rejected” applicants have the necessary entry qualifications to gain admission.

For the 2011/12 session, we had a total of 117 varsities with 1, 503, 933 applicants. Carrying capacity rose marginally to 500, 000 translating to 33.25 per cent. For the 2012/13 session the figure stood at 128 varsities, 1, 735, 729 applicants with 520, 000 carrying capacity.

While it is an established fact that most institutions exceed recommended quota; it is also evident that over 70% of candidates are denied admission yearly, even though as mentioned earlier, most are qualified. There is just not enough space to accommodate them.

For this 2012/2013 academic session’s where 1.7million jostle for 520,000 admission spaces; over 1.2million were denied admission. In reality, this is discouraging to candidates and parents. While Governments (Federal and States) have made modest strides in creating more institutions, it is also very important to increase the capacity and equip already existing ones.

The answer, to me, is not in so much as creating new institutions to score cheap political points, but having a clear cut road map on how to increase the capacities of existing institutions. While this is going on, we should never lose sight of the fact that infrastructure does not lecture students’; lecturers do. But in this area we are already facing enormous challenge as there is a dearth in qualified lecturers. As things stand today, most Nigerian undergraduates pass through the system without have the opportunity of being lectured by professors. Some don’t even have the opportunity even at masters’ level.

My point is this: focusing on infrastructure should not take us from the bulls’ eye of setting and maintaining quality education since the world is now one ‘small’ village where there is a global standard. We either conform to this global standard or remain a mediocre nation.

In it March 28 edition titled: “The world is going to university,” The Economist newspaper wrote: “In 2014, 19 of the 20 universities in the world that produced the most highly cited research papers were American.” This is where the world is going. Research has become an integral part of any serious university. This is why American varsities are riding the waves at the moment. But if we have to tell ourselves the hard truth, most of our varsities have lost touch with the real world.

While we are exploring avenues at increasing carrying capacities of our varsities, we should never lose touch with the fact that it is quality that matters. The Economist pointed out that while America is making strides in the area of research and citations, on the educational side, the picture is less clear.

“American graduates,” it wrote “score poorly in international numeracy and literacy rankings, and are slipping. In a recent study of academic achievement, 45% of American students made no gains in their first two years of university. Meanwhile, tuition fees have nearly doubled, in real terms, in 20 years. Student debt, at nearly $1.2 trillion, has surpassed credit-card debt and car loans.”

Agreeing that going to university is definitely not a bad investment for a student, it wrote that it isn’t clear whether the growing investment in tertiary education makes sense for society as a whole. If graduates earn more than non-graduates because their studies have made them more productive, then university education will boost economic growth and society should want more of it. Yet poor student scores suggest otherwise, as it is in the US, it is also applicable here. So, too, does the testimony of employers.

This is where things also get interesting. A recent study of recruitment by professional-services firms – mentioned in the report – found that they took graduates from the most prestigious universities not because of what the candidates might have learned but because of those institutions’ tough selection procedures. In short, students could be paying vast sums merely to go through a very elaborate sorting mechanism.

It shouldn’t surprise us that our varsities are no longer recruitment grounds for companies. In the past undergraduates were identified by companies before they complete their studies; but today, those services have been outsourced to recruitment agencies who now recruit for these companies from foreign varsities because of the large number of Nigerians studying abroad. In all these, we may end up churning out hundreds of thousands of graduates going nowhere in a world where ‘Nigerian standards’ have paled into insignificance.

While it may be argued – like The Economist did – that we may all be moving toward imbibing the American university model as more universities in more countries are charging students tuition fees because the “knowledge economy” requires top-flight research, public resources are being focused on a few privileged institutions and the competition to create world-class universities which is intensifying with the issue of global rankings.

But ranking – the American way – has its obverse side as the government rewards universities for research, that would be what professors concentrate on. Good as this is, it may water down that necessary contact with students. Another is that students would be looking for a degree from an institution that will impress employers who are often primarily interested in the selectivity of the institution a candidate has attended.

In some ways, this in itself is not bad because the best universities are responsible for many of the discoveries that have made the world a safer, richer and more interesting place. To however effectively play in this league, we cannot run away from a market-based system that places emphasis on charging tuition fees. But the challenge would be how to operate this system in the midst of wide spread poverty which may exclude a large proportion of mainly indigent students. Bridging this gap, and remaining competitive at the same time, is the hard question begging for answers.

I had series of discussions with a parent who has three children in different universities across the country recently. He lamented that he spends millions of naira annually in fees and upkeep of his children and was wondering what jobs they would get in present day Nigeria to compensate for the huge funds he will, in the end, expend on their education. One of our discussions veered into the area of course relevance and the challenges of the 21st century where change is quite rapid.

“I discover that most of the content of courses offered in our universities today is not in tune with current realities, I even learnt that some lectures still use notes from the 1990s to teach students in this age and time. I also painfully discovered that a good percentage of them have stopped researching for various reasons,” he told me.

He’s not the only one with these concerns. Without mincing words, our varsities need reform if we are to effectively key into the knowledge era. In their essay: “Learning for a World of Constant Change: Homo Sapiens, Home Faber & Homo Ludens revisited,” Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown argued that for much of the 20th  century, learning had focused on the acquisition of skills or transmission of information “or what we define as ‘learning about.”’

They added that near the end of the 20th century learning theorists started to recognise the value of “learning to be,” of putting learning into a situated context that deals with systems and identity as well as the transmission of knowledge. “We want to suggest that now even that is not enough. Although learning about and learning to be worked well in a relatively stable world, in a world of constant flux, we need to embrace a theory of learning to become. Where most theories of learning see becoming as a transitional state toward becoming something, we want to suggest that the 21st century requires us to think of learning as a practice of becoming over and over again…to embrace change and focus on becoming as central and persistent elements of learning.”

Why should we be bothered about recreating our varsities? The answer is simple. Knowledge has become the most important factor for economic development in the 21st century. Through its capacity to augment productivity, it increasingly constitutes the foundation of a country’s competitive advantage.

This change, as expected, is most evident in developed countries, where investments in the intangibles that makes up the knowledge base of a country (e.g., research and development, higher education, computer software, patents) equals, or even exceeds investments in physical equipment. Nigeria and other developing economies, while affected by these transformations, are not yet reaping their benefits because they’ve not effectively invested in it.

When the “Asian tigers” burst forth industrially in the 1990s, their ‘economic miracle’ was linked to substantial prior investment in human resources. These strategic investments were deliberate. Their university systems were overhauled; extent intellectual property protection laws were reviewed. As expected, this led to the historical evolution of industrial Research and Development (R&D) and the mutually beneficial partnership between private industries, universities and government in R&D.

Research suggests that public policy plays an important role in shaping national innovative capacity by determining human capital investments and creating incentives for innovation.  Countries that have increased their innovative capacities have invested heavily in science and engineering education in addition to arts and humanities. This often leads to the promotion of competition as the basis for innovation.

Does Nigeria possess the necessary elements to develop a national innovation system?  We have, but the facts are not encouraging. Where data is available, it indicates low levels of investment in research capacity and education. This explains why our non-oil economy has remained consistently sluggish over the years.

On the research side, Nigeria’s number of scientific publications is negligible. For instance, from 1,062 scientific publications in 1981, it fell to a mere 711 in 1995. In contrast, scientific publications were 3,413 for South Africa, 14,883 for India, 310 for Indonesia, and 5,440 for Brazil. Nigeria’s low research output reflects the low priority accorded R&D by government decision-makers. This is not only applicable in the sciences alone, it cuts across all disciplines.

As we are on the threshold of a new dispensation, innovative thinking and new strategies are seriously needed to serve as essential guides to future educational provision and practice. Such strategies should include improvement of evaluation and accreditation systems, review of programs to make them more responsive to societal needs, informed management of higher education, promotion of university linkages with the private sector, and involvement in policy analysis through research.

In addition, improvement of higher education will require more effective utilisation of new information and communication technologies. Our varsities will need to review their missions and come up with specific strategic plans based on each university’s unique situation, as well as national and global issues affecting universities.

A number of programs already address the issue of 21st century skills. For example, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), a U.S. advocacy organization formed in 2002, developed a vision of the broader set of skills required for success in the 21st century. These include core skills covered by the existing curriculum in most countries – language, mathematics, science, and arts – combined with 21st century themes such as environmental awareness and the impacts of globalization. These are complemented by learning and innovation skills, information media and technology skills, and life and career skills.

It is possible to build on the P21 framework which will enhance capacity in problem solving and decision making, creative and critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and negotiation,  intellectual curiosity and the ability to find, select, structure, and evaluate information.

Additionally, effective economic and social operation in the 21st century demands adaptability, cultural awareness and advanced critical thinking and information literacy skills, demanding continuing learning opportunities in vital areas of the arts and humanities. The constant herdsmen/farmers clash in some parts of the country readily comes to mind which further points to the fact that we need new sets of skills, but it appears our varsities have all gone to sleep.

While we are sleeping, many 21st century skills are already supported by curricula around the world. For example, the U.K. science curriculum is designed to enable students to develop a number of skills such as teamwork and creative problem solving. Efforts are also made to translate theory into practice.

The transformation of skills and technology use cannot take place without a new approach to system reform. There has been a revolutionary change in nearly every dimension of society, with the exception of our lecture halls where we continue to reinforce traditional approaches to teaching. Changing this will require leaders to develop a compelling vision of 21st century learning, communicate it with passion, and ensure that it is translated into action at all levels of the system.

The factors responsible for the poor quality of university programs (and graduates) appear to be both internal and external to the universities.  Internal factors include strikes, lack of employee motivation, and weak accountability for educational performance. External factors comprise lecturer shortages, corruption, inconsistent funding efforts by government, and admissions based on quotas rather than merit.

It is about time we take a look again at the Higher Education Policy Reforms which was formulated years ago to infuse quality into the university system in order to bring back its old glory in line with international standards. As things stand now there is a mismatch between teaching in our tertiary institutions and the needs of the labour markets. In essence, graduates from our institutions have acquired skills which are not demanded by the labour market. This, no doubt, is the major reason for the soaring unemployment rate in the country.

Knowledge, as a 21st century currency, is necessary but not sufficient for today’s success because Students need skills to be able to apply their knowledge. This is today’s critical challenge.