Nigeria must rethink and overhaul its education system to prepare the population for the future. Analysts say there is a mismatch between the town and gown, meaning that the schools are not meeting the industry needs.
More so, science, technology and mathematics (STEM), which are hallmarks of industrial economies, are not being taken too seriously in Nigeria, with many applicants for university exams preferring arts to the sciences.
Juliet Anammah, CEO of Jumia Nigeria, said it is important for schools to begin to train students in skills needed by industries.
Analysts further say that for the Nigeria education sector to effectively play in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, robust infrastructure, consistent policies, and investment in easy access to digital technology are keys to enhancing knowledge, skills and competencies.
Fourth Industrial Revolution is all about the rapid proliferation of technologies that will have broad and deep impact on the future of learning, workforce and other aspects of life.
Florence Obi, former deputy vice-chancellor, University of Calabar, Cross River State, told Businessday that to tackle the challenges confronting the education system, managers of the education space need to establish a national quality assurance and monitoring system.
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Obi observed that the quality of senior secondary products has implications for entrants into the universities, polytechnics and colleges of education. “The acerbic comments and complaints about the quality of products from secondary schools by higher education practitioners will be diminished if there is a National Quality Assurance and Monitoring System that can synchronise minimum standards across the system,” she said.
The elements making up the system will be the Inspectorate Service at the State and Federal levels, NUC, NBTE, and NCCE. The statutory quality assurance functions of the different agencies will not be thinned down by this arrangement and the strength of the arrangement will be in the component elements learning from one another and collaborating in monitoring, system-wide, rather than in individual cocoons of their sub-sector, she explained.
Other challenges facing the nation’s education sector especially higher institutions of learning in Nigeria include the absence of infrastructure on campus for learning and an industrial backbone for internships.
“Unfortunately, the industrial backbone has been very weak and the entire economy has been run as one big consumer market, dominated by imports from all over the world, especially China. As such, there are no outlets to practice these theories. Secondly, the institutions themselves need to be upgraded, both for the human ware as well as the soft and hardware, to enable the students study in the 21st Century” said Oyewusi Ibidapo Obe, professor of Systems Engineering, educational administrator and former vice chancellor of the University of Lagos.
Access to university education has been challenged due to limited carrying capacity. One way of dealing with this is to embark on massive upgrading of physical facilities in existing universities to take at least additional 1,000 students per year. This will involve more classrooms, hostels, laboratories, workshops, libraries and offices.
In this light, staff recruitment is to be undertaken in the quantity and quality to match the annual growth in student enrolment. With successful scaling of NUC due diligence on the expanded facilities and increased human resources, carrying capacity is increased to 1000.
Isaac Adeyemi, former vice chancellor, Bells University, Otta Ogun State, told Businessday that the growth potential of education in Nigeria especially the tertiary level is stifled by inability to faithfully implement national policy provisions.
Adeyemi observed that this failure in policy implementation has resulted in products from the school system at all levels coming out in poor state.
