Tertiary or higher education may not be universal or compulsory as primary and secondary/technical education; however, it is equally essential to any nation wishing to attain or retain the status of a 21st century modern industrial state.
It is for this reason that in some countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Cuba, Argentina, France, Scotland, Turkey, Brazil, Germany, Russia and China, tertiary or higher education is free. In some other industrialized countries, higher education is heavily subsidized by government and private sector, and indigent students are supported with free grants (scholarships) as well as with loans re-payable, after they graduate, in instalments comfortably spread over 10 or more years.
If we in Nigeria have so mismanaged our resources that we cannot make higher education entirely free for everyone, we should, at least for now, adopt the same fee-paying protocol proposed for our primary and secondary education—namely, that families that can afford to pay should pay; those that absolutely cannot should get it free; and those in-between should pay what they reasonably can, depending on their verifiable income. No student who has met the admission requirements and performed creditably in the competitive entrance exams (JAMB, UTME) should be denied higher education for lack of money.
That Nigerian education as a whole is in crisis is beyond dispute. When year after year the federal budget allocation for education is laughable (smaller even than the yearly allocation for debt servicing), and teachers are not only the poorest paid professionals but are also owed salary for months—is it any wonder that education has remained in its broken and dilapidated state?
But beyond the gross under-funding of education and the under-payment of teachers, Nigeria shot itself in the foot when it inaugurated polytechnics in the mid-1970s with the goal of producing the technical and managerial manpower that would spearhead the much dreamed of “industrial take-off,” but then, adopting the antiquated hierarchical tradition of British higher education, named the polytechnics as inferior to universities and its “diplomates” as inferior to university “graduates.”
Nigeria committed the same fatal error with colleges of education, which were intended to produce secondary school teachers but whose National Certificate of Education (NCE) was ranked as distinctly inferior to a bachelors degree.
Predictably, these “diplomates” and “certificate holders” rejected the inferior workplace decreed for them, and spent 7 or 8 years struggling to achieve a “degree” in a “proper” university. Their psychic trauma and colossal waste of time and resources contributed to the confusion and disarray in our higher education, and with it the perpetual strikes, the collapse of morals, morale and ésprit, and the collapse of teaching and learning standards.
This is what Nigerian education has garnered from half a century of mismanagement and neglect by our leaders and keepers, including the successive Ministers of Education.
As with our primary, secondary and technical education, our tertiary or higher education now needs to be re-conceived and re-structured.
Hitherto, our higher institutions have been a jumble of unrelated parts, seemingly conceived in isolation and fitting into no single master-plan. It is time to realign the curricula of these institutions into a flexible system of developmental sequences and dovetailing parts, of parallel and complementary functions.
What is needed, first and foremost, is a unified system of equivalence—horizontal instead of vertical or hierarchical—a system based on the functional equivalence and equality of all tertiary or higher educational institutions by whatever name: university, university of technology, polytechnic, college of technology, college of education, institute, academy, etc. Regardless of name, these are all universities (in India they call some of them “deemed universities”).
Entry requirements to higher institutions should be the same (e.g. 5 Credits in WASC/GCE), varying only in the subjects required in some specialties (e.g. Chemistry & Biology for Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing, Lab Technology, etc.; Maths & Physics for Engineering, Information Technology, etc.).
Some specialties may require more than 4 years of study (engineering may require 5 years; same with law, for professional accreditation in the Law School). But regardless of specialty or number of years needed to graduate, the commonest global naming system should apply, i.e. the products of these tertiary institutions are to be called graduates. Their first graduation certificate is a bachelors degree (BA, BSc, BTech, BEd, LLB, BBA, etc.). The second (advanced degree) is a masters degree (MA, MSc, MBA, LLM, MPH, etc.); the third is a doctorate degree (PhD, DSc, etc.).
There may be other variations and exceptions, e.g. medical doctors do not graduate until they have completed their clinical internships and specialist training and then they receive at once their professional (advanced/doctoral) degree of MD (Doctor of Medicine), DDS (Doctor of Dental Surgery), PharmD (Doctor of Pharmacy), etc. All graduates join the work force at salaries determined by supply and demand of their skills and specialties in the marketplace.
Excellent examples of a flexible system of developmental sequences and dovetailing parts, of parallel and complementary functions especially in undergraduate education, are the higher education systems of the United States and of Russia. With borrowings from there and elsewhere, Nigeria’s higher educational institutions can be realigned, harmonized and modernized into a system better suited to our needs than the outdated snobbish colonial system.
NEXT WEEK we shall examine the American and Russian models of tertiary / higher education to see what might be learned from them.
Onwuchekwa Jemie
