Nigeria’s tertiary education system has few spaces for increasing applicants

BusinessDay investigations reveal that carrying capacity in tertiary education institutions in Nigeria has not significantly improved in relationship to the exponential growth in the number of candidates seeking tertiary education in the country.

Tertiary education institutions in Nigeria include, but not limited to, the universities, colleges of education and polytechnics. In the last Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME), it is reported that up to 1.3million candidates sat for the examinations, while the spaces available were not more than 450,000. In 2008/2009 academic year, there were about 1,054,060 applicants to Nigerian universities and only 200,000 were admitted, which is just 18.9  percent of the total number of applicants.

The growing un-met local demand for tertiary education and the high premium placed on foreign degrees has resulted into an exodus of students to other countries for higher education, a trend that is fuelled also by a growing class of Nigerians who can afford paying for foreign education. According to data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, Nigeria comes second, after Morocco in the list of African countries that sends students overseas.

Investigations further reveal that total enrollment in tertiary education institutions in 1980 was 57,742, in 1990 was 179,494, and in 2010 was 1,701,123. There is no doubt that enrolment in higher education has grown tremendously but  experts say enrollment figures are still low compared to a growing and huge youth population seeking un-existing places in tertiary education in the country.

Nigeria seems not to be alone, as the trend appears to be common in sub-Saharan Africa. The Africa Higher Education Summit held in Dakar Senegal last March highlighted that “the current higher education enrolment ratio for sub-Saharan Africa is 8 percent whereas Arab states (including those outside of the African continent) enroll 26 percent of college-aged students today. (In comparison, the participation rate in the developed world is much higher still, and was just under 76 percent in 2012.). The Summit further identified that “Africa spends $1 billion per year on higher education when the continent should be spending $50 billion”…the number of students has more than tripled from 2.7 million in 1991 to 9.3 million in 2006 and continues to rise.

To increase admission capacity, the government of Goodluck Jonathan established 9 new federal universities in 2011. This move by GEJ met with criticism as some stakeholders believe that government should have expanded carrying capacity in existing universities by increased funding rather than creating entirely new universities.

The increasing demand for tertiary education and the unbridled desire for university degrees may be fuelling the growth of what National Universities Commission (NUC) regards as illegal degree awarding institutions sprouting across Nigeria. Many young people who express desperation in the search of tertiary qualifications, and are often frustrated by the failure to gain admission through the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) likely fall prey to these illegal institutions.

Chinedu Duru, managing consultant, Hamilton Lloyd and Associates, a human capital development firm says that “a shortfall of 850,000 youths who will not be absorbed into the tertiary educational system in Nigeria is a huge number that is capable of creating socio-political problems in Nigeria in the long-run. This problem has been with us for a while and has been exacerbated by the progressive decay in the educational sector over the last 10-15 years economies due to poor spending, mismanagement and corruption”

Duru however states “that there is too much emphasis being placed on tertiary education in Nigeria. The truth is that we cannot all have university degrees! The primary and secondary levels of education should begin to identify skills and aptitudes early and focus students in their specific vocations, as it is done in the advanced economies”. For Duru, a student “who does not have the aptitude for calculus, for example, but is extremely good with his hands can be stirred towards more hand-skill based vocation like carpentry”.

IKENNA OBI