IMPROVING THE QUALITY AND RANKING OF NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES

IMPROVING THE QUALITY AND RANKING OF NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES
BY


GABRIEL ALUM

It is a well known fact that ninety percent of what exist today as universities in Nigeria could simply be regarded as mere glorified secondary schools.

This is because most of the nation’s universities are characterized by infrastructural decay and paucity of fund for research purposes. Perhaps, these and other factors may have been sources of the current quagmire and face off between the federal government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU. In swift response to the demands of the striking lecturers, the federal government recently announced plans to upgrade thirteen institutions including six universities with the sum of forty-seven billion naira ETF funds Of this amount, thirty-three billion naira was earmarked for universities, excluding amounts set aside for research, scholarly publications, journals and text books. These undoubtedly, account for the inability of the nation’s universities to fall within the fifty in Africa, while internationally, none in the top one thousand.

This laudable decision of government was said to be informed by the need to improve the quality of education in the tertiary institutions and boost the continental and global rating of Nigerian universities, against the backdrop of their continued poor ratings in Africa and the world at large. This reality is in the least consideration worrisome and embarrassing to a country that prides itself as the giant of Africa and which is trying to position itself in the top twenty economies of the world by the year 2020. There is no doubt, universities are very important to the overall national development.

It is recognized by all including policy makers that the quality of education across the entire spectrum has fallen to almost irredeemable levels.
This has led to several calls for a declaration of emergency in the sector, underscoring the level of decay in the system. This decline is amply reflected in the poor performance of Nigerian graduates in simple aptitudes and basic tasks, complaints about competence of professionals such as medical doctors and also the rejection of Nigerian graduates and by many foreign institutions.

Various factors have been adduced as contributing to the sharp decline in quality, including the strong voice of the former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, Professor Peter Okebukola. These have been identified to include poor quality of students, quality and quantity of academic staff, poor state of teaching, learning and research infrastructure such as laboratories, equipment, classrooms, lecture theatres, studios, obsolete books and journals, staff and students welfare in the forms of housing, hostels, water supply, electricity etc.

The decline in quality is being increasingly manifested by ascending of mediocrity in research, award of higher degrees and even promotion to professional chairs. In may universities for instance, the primary imperative for management is to produce more PhDs, Senior lecturers and Professors to meet NUC accreditation requirements in order to avoid the stigma and embarrassment of denied programmes. The International paradigm for accreditation and rating entails collecting data of indicators of quality which are then weighed for each institution.

They include staff-student ratio, percentage of foreign students and staff, research output, students retention rates, average amount spent on each student, alumni donations, graduates job prospects, students selectivity, number of publications and their impact factors and citations.

There are however indicators which are difficult for most Nigerians universities to meet such as number of publications in elite journals such as nature and science, number of nobel prizes won, number of highly cited researchers and peer review by international panel of experts.

Also of great concern is the caliber of professors turned out by the nation’s universities. This is because the award of professorship is often politically motivated. It is indeed disheartening to listen to some of the nation’s so called Professors speaking in the public or presenting lecturers during seminars or conferences. Their standard of English is nothing to write home about.

Moreover, the rate at which professorship is awarded needs to be reviewed. How could one be awarded such an enviable title without outstanding researches and publications? The Nigerian university has been in a free fall since the late eighties, spanning over three decades.

Therefore fixing the ailments is a kin to a chronic disease which requires not only strong medicine but prolonged treatment over a long time. Again, crucially important in raising standards and quality of a university is the academic capacity to conduct cutting edge research which has been replaced over the decades by pedestrian and mediocre research activities and publications.

Simply put, the nation’s PhDs and Professors and nowhere close to international standards particularly in the basic, applied and physical and engineering sciences.

Source FRCN.Recorded live from the daily commentaries.