24th January, 2016
By: AmirAbdulazeez
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efore we proceed to digest the topic at hand, it is
inevitable to note the contemporary knack for quantity at the expense of
quality that dominates and generally defines our tertiary education sub-sector
in particular and the education sector in general. We now boast of many
universities that largely fall short not only of international standard, but
even of African standard.
The number of federal, state and private universities
operating in Nigeria and registered by the Nigerian Universities Commission stands
at about 130 which rose from 51 in 2005. However, from 2005 to date, none of any
of the Nigerian universities managed to make it into the top 500 of the yearly world’s
universities ranking even once. In fact, according to an analysis by Premium Times, in the top 800 of the
latest rankings, only 1 Nigerian university is present, which is the University
of Ibadan, occupying the 601st position. Even this cannot be seen as
an achievement because of the fact that, there are 6 other African universities
in the top 500. Whether we accept or reject these rankings, we can’t deny the
fact that the continuous flocking of Nigerian students to countries which had
few or no any recognized university as at 1948 when University of Ibadan was
created or 1962 when Ahmadu Bello University Zaria was created, is a clear testimony
to the dwindling quality or unattractiveness of our tertiary education. Further
proof to this is the fact that one hardly finds students from other countries
coming to Nigeria for tertiary education. Despite all of this, we still have an
unprecedented knack for more universities while in reality some need to be
scrapped or merged with others.
Coming back to our main topic, the issue of funding is
one of the major problems being faced by Nigerian public universities. In fact,
it is one of the primary reasons why our universities have failed in many
respects to adequately compete with their international counterparts. Poor
funding has been directly or indirectly responsible for the poor standard of
tertiary education in the country. Nigerian public universities primarily
depend on government for funding with different internally generated revenue
policies and systems serving as complementary source.
With inadequate funding from the government, many
universities rely on aggressive and in many cases, easy and exploitative
revenue generation methods to make up for the funding gap. Some of these
methods tend to portray the universities as revenue generation agencies rather
than institutions of learning. In a bid to bridge the wide funding gap, many
Nigerian universities have resorted to charging exorbitant and in some cases
ridiculous application, processing and registration fees for their
undergraduate and more significantly post-graduate programmes. Such exorbitant
fees are been hiked regularly with any slight opportunity. These have partly contributed
in making tertiary education very difficult and virtually impossible for the
poor Nigerian.
In some universities, students are forced to pay high
sums for the use of facilities which are built and maintained by public money.
In many cases for instance, students opt for private hostels instead of the
university hostels which are more expensive. Some sort of unnecessary fees that
hitherto seem strange to many universities are now introduced. These include
acceptance fees after admission, aptitude test fees for post graduate
admission, post UME and Direct Entry fees and some other fees that give easy revenues.
The list of fees is growing periodically and they vary from one university to
another. All these are in most cases in return for poor services.
In many universities, students are made to pay
registration fees at faculties and departments apart from the central
registration fees. The central registration component in itself contains many ambiguous
items and provisions which a student may never use or need and yet labelled
non-refundable after payment. Apart from all these fees, whenever there is an
excursion, practical sessions, research theses defences or special activities,
in many cases students are asked to pay or fully sponsor themselves. Penalties
in most universities have been reduced to financial. Defaulting like late
registration, incorrect registration and change of courses are punished with monetary
fines.
With these sorts of easy, unearned and exploitative
revenue generation policies, many Nigerian universities are tilting towards commercialization.
At an era when education is fast becoming a human right and many countries are
working towards giving it completely free to their citizens and universities
across the world are offering fully-funded scholarships, our universities
shouldn’t be operating like this.
It is true that some of these revenue generation
policies are not only exclusive to Nigerian universities, but it’s hard to find
public universities in other countries that foist these exploitative charges on
students that are their own nationals. May be they can do such on foreign or
special categories of students. Some may also argue that these revenue generation
policies are carried out with good intentions and are in some cases adequately
utilized for capital and other projects in order to facelift and develop the
universities. But, should the end justify the means? If universities must
develop, then it should never be at the expense of the students, which they
were established to serve in the first place.
What is the way out? One thing is starkly clear not
only in Nigeria and the developing world but even in the developed world;
universities cannot rely and grow from public funding. They must think out of
the box on how to generate revenues without exploiting anyone, let alone their
own students.
Universities are not only teaching and learning centres;
they are also centres for research and innovation- a major component virtually
missing in most Nigerian universities. Nigerian universities can work round the
clock to make break-through in researches and innovations which they can sell
for millions of Nairas and Dollars to private individuals and corporate
organizations. Universities can set up consulting centres or units with a bulk
of its academic staff serving as quality and reliable consultants. This will
attract a lot of revenues to the universities. Universities can design
executive courses, trainings, seminars, programmes and workshops for entrepreneurs
with the dual objectives of innovation and revenue generation. They can also
write and publish books and journals, set up and properly maintain standard
printing presses and book shops that provide quality services to the public.
As is common with many agencies, corruption and mismanagement
is surprisingly also responsible for wastage of resources in many Nigerian
universities. The universities managements must in addition to the prudent
management of scarce resources, block leakages and wastages to pave way for a
corrupt-free university system. A typical example is how some university staff
use public facilities to do external work and don’t remit earnings from these
works to the management. Revenues can be saved from this.
The federal and state governments in collaboration
with the university managements can work to make the universities attractive
especially by improving standard and publicity, so that international students
would find them worth to study in. With this, the extra fees charged foreign
students would increase revenue. This will also keep Nigerian students to study
in Nigeria and the large sums of monies they use to study abroad will be used
to develop our universities here.
The Federal Government should stop issuing licenses to
many of the private universities largely considered incompetent. Alternatively,
they can make special legislations and provisions for them to function as units,
schools or faculties that offer special courses in public universities, with
such universities supervising and internally regulating them. In turn, they pay
a percentage of the proceeds they make from those courses to the host university.
The need for Nigerian universities to migrate away
from some of their revenue generation policies is imminent even though it can
only happen gradually with other alternatives being introduced and tested. In as
much as public universities may want to generate revenues, they should consider
their integrity in the short-run and reputation in the long-run. Public universities
cannot be sustainably funded through such policies and with the trend at which
they are continuing, the boundary between them and the private universities may
disappear sooner or later.
Mallam Amir is on Twitter: @AmirAbdulazeez
