Increasing number of schools, both public and private and years of schooling is still failing to yield the desired outcome in terms of a globally competitive education system.
There are more schools today, primary, secondary and tertiary, than there have ever been in Nigeria’s history. This has translated to an ever increasing higher level of schooling for individual Nigerians, measured by number of years spent in formal education.
For instance, the number of private universities has increased by 3, 200 percent as it jumped from about two in 1999 to 66 in 2017 according to data from the National Universities Commission (NUC). But consumers of products from the education system remain concerned about quality of university output with employers at the forefront lamenting the apparent poor quality of graduates.
From a low of less than two years in 1950, the level of schooling for any random person in Nigeria has tripled to more than six years today. This increasing trend has marched on with a simultaneous explosion in the number of schools and colleges.
“This triple increase in the average number of years spent in school and the explosion in number of schools seem to have largely proceeded to the detriment of quality and relevance. While schools and schooling have expanded, quality, competence and relevance have progressively deteriorated, even becoming abysmal” contends Bongo Adi, faculty member at the Lagos Business School, Lagos.
Africa’s most populous nation ranked 25 out 26 countries on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) human capital optimisation index for Africa, coming in only before Chad, a country that has been destabilised by civil unrest since 2008.
The World Economic Forum’s Human Capital Index, which measures the extent to which countries and economies optimise their human capital through education and skills development and its deployment throughout the life-course, finds that Sub-Saharan Africa, on average, currently only captures 55 percent of its full human capital potential, compared to a global average of 65 percent, ranging from 67 to 63 percent in Mauritius, Ghana and South Africa, to only 49 to 44 percent in Mali, Nigeria and Chad.
“This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following developments in Nigeria’s education space. For starters, since I graduated from the University of Ibadan, over 30 years, little has changed in the curriculum used to educate teachers and the quality of education and human capital development reflect the quality of teachers” said Folashade Adefisayo, principal consultant at Leading Learning Ltd, an education consulting firm, based in Lagos.
Some experts say the situation has become so bad to the order that a typical university graduate today has educational competence that sometimes rivals that of a 4th grader in 1976. The Economist in January argued that just 1 in 4 of secondary school students in countries such as Nigeria could reach the basic level of attainment in standardised international tests.
Deteriorating quality is unfortunately, not the only problem the education system faces. At the basic level, figures from the United Nations Children Education Fund (UNICEF) show that 40 per cent of Nigerian children aged 6-11 do not attend any primary school, with the Northern region recording the lowest school attendance rate, particularly for girls.
“Despite a significant increase in net enrollment rates in recent years, it is estimated that about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school,” according a statement on UNICEF’s website. This means these children who are out of school are not being given a chance to compete in the future.
Alongside these trends is the increasing loss of confidence in public schools which has fueled the explosion of private schools across the three levels of education in the country since 1983. Between 2006 and 2016, enrollment into private secondary schools in Nigeria grew from 11percent to almost 42 percent, a three-fold increase over a decade.
The public secondary schools that produced the bulk of Nigeria’s current class of leaders have all but become an effigy of what they used to be. Their dismal state is evidently manifest in the Cowbell Mathematics competition which has been won by a disproportionate number of private secondary schools over the past 19 years of the competition.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
