With many new universities being licensed by the Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC) still using outmoded curricula and offering the same old courses that have failed to lift the country from the abyss of underdevelopment for decades, experts have expressed concern that the nation’s salvation may not be anywhere in sight.
This is as human resources experts have for long continued to lament that Nigeria’s university education system has failed to equip graduates with the right skills suited for today’s challenging work environment and are rather producing graduates that are irrelevant to the developmental needs of the country.
“Today’s organisations hire people to perform specific tasks that help them in achieving their business goals. They don’t want graduates that parade just certificates, but graduates with the right working skills who can contribute to the development of the organisation. They want technical competence; they also want candidates properly equipped with complementary skills such as problem-solving ability, interpersonal skills, effective communication skills (oral and written), reflective and critical thinking ability, organising skills and ability to translate ideas to action,” says a human resources manager in a Lagos-based communications outfit.
“Unfortunately, the average graduate of a Nigerian university lacks most of these skills. That is why you often hear those of us in the employment circles lament that Nigerian graduates are unemployable,” he says.
Henrietta Onwuegbuzie, academic director, Owner-Manager Programme at the Lagos Business School, contends that schools need to develop job creators, not jobseekers.
“In fact, what some schools succeed in doing is to de-programme those who already possess some entrepreneurial drive, moulding them into jobseekers. Recall that the school system in Nigeria was designed to produce civil servants, not entrepreneurs. Yet the society has since changed and the education system needs to adapt and lead the change,” she tells BDSUNDAY.
For a country where graduate unemployment is already considered by many as a big risk factor owing to its high rate, and where employment opportunities are few and far between, analysts have said what Nigeria needs most at this time is technical and entrepreneurial education that will produce job creators instead of jobseekers as is clearly the case now.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics report for Q1 2016, unemployment and underemployment were highest for persons in the labour force between the ages of 15-24 and 24-34 years, which represents the youth population in the labour force. The unemployment rate within the period under review was typically highest for those within the ages of 15-24 at 21.5 percent (56.1 percent using old methodology), up from 19.0 percent in Q4 2015 and 17.8 percent in Q3 2015.
Out of a total youth labour force of 38.2 million (representing 48.7 percent of total labour force in Nigeria of 78.48 million), 15.2 million were either unemployed or underemployed in Q1 2016, representing a youth unemployment rate of 42.24 percent. This rate of unemployment and underemployment appears to be the result of a faulty education or human capital development system in Nigeria.
Yet in spite of the proliferation of universities in every part of the country, most of the new universities being established are not bringing anything new to the table. They are neither equipping their students with the right kind of job skills nor training them to be entrepreneurs and employers rather than jobseekers. They are doing the same thing over and over and expecting a change, experts lament.
For instance, a list of available programmes in Edwin Clark University, Kiagbodo, Delta State, as seen by BDSUNDAY in recent newspaper advert placed the university, include Accounting, Banking and Finance, Business Administration, Economics, English, Mass Communication, Marketing, and Political Science for the Faculty of Humanities, Social and Management Sciences, while for the Faculty of Sciences, the courses include Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Industrial Chemistry, Mathematics, Microbiology and Physics.
The university in the said advert had invited candidates who made it their first choice in the 2016 UTME and other interested candidates who obtained a minimum score of 180 to its admission screening documentation exercise.
When BDSUNDAY drew the attention of the Lagos-based human resources manager to the advertisement by the university, he was furious.
“For God’s sake, are these not the same regular courses that many universities in Nigeria have been offering for many decades without much impact? What new thing is this university doing? And why NUC keeps approving these universities beats one’s imagination,” he says.
“For a country in desperate need of development and industrialisation, this is clearly not the way to go. Every new university getting approval must justify its raison d’etre by tailoring its programmes to the developmental needs of the country,” he added.
Onwuegbuzie says Nigeria has depended on oil for many years, but if you go round the country, there is no university that offers petroleum engineering.
“You might find civil engineering, building engineering, and chemical engineering, among others. We would rather send students abroad to study petroleum engineering. It is a systemic failure of the education in Nigeria,” she argues.
“What I believe is that schools in general and universities in particular should develop courses that address current problems in society and produce students that are able to connect the dots. We need to develop both entrepreneurs and managers, because both are needed. An entrepreneurial mindset is critical as it would enable graduates to solve problems and create jobs. We need an overhaul of the university curriculum. Founding new universities that mimic their older counterparts is counterproductive,” she adds.
But Edwin Clark University is not the only culprit as virtually all other newly established universities in the country have toed the same line.
“Just as it happens at the other levels of education, most of the new private universities you see today setting up shop are in it purely for the gain. They know that the public school system cannot accommodate the multitudes that seek admission every year, so they come in handy to take in those left behind but who are clearly desperate for higher education,” Fola Arowolo, who heads a private secondary school in the Ojo area of Lagos, tells BDSUNDAY.
“If you ask me, these new universities are adding to the problem by churning out more graduates into the labour market. Rather than establish more universities to train graduates who would come and begin to look for jobs in an already flooded labour market, shouldn’t they be thinking of establishing industries to employ those who are graduates already?” he queries.
One close source that prefers anonymity, however, tells BDSUNDAY that there are just a fistful of these universities that are getting it right. He specifically mentions American University of Nigeria (AUN), located in Yola, Adamawa State.
“AUN incorporates the right mix of entrepreneurship education into its curriculum such that in my close interaction with some graduating students of the university, it was clear to me they knew where they were headed. All of them I spoke with told me they were not going out there to seek to be anybody’s employee,” says the source.
“There may also be a couple of other serious ones, but these are the exception rather than the rule,” he adds.
Gurpreet Jagpal, director, research, enterprise and innovation and CEO, South Bank University Enterprises, also decries the disconnect between the universities and the outside society. According to him, the days when universities existed in isolation, with university dons researching problems without direct bearing or relevance to societal problems, are gone.
“I think universities should develop solutions to real problems. At the South Bank University, we interface with captains of industry. Our curriculum design and delivery are determined by industry and societal needs. Our students work on problems that could be commercialised and they hold stakes when such concepts get to the market. This is the way to go, I believe,” he tells BD SUNDAY.
He believes that setting up a university is serious business because any university that does not create entrepreneurs or problem solvers has no reason to stay in existence.
CHUKS OLUIGBO & STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
