One would have thought that with the establishment of private universities in the country, the quality of education would improve, yet, the chunk of graduates produced by these universities has done little to improve the quality of graduate in the labour market.
Need to know that there are 79 private universities spread all over the country, making it almost fifty percent of the total number of universities in Nigeria. Yet a random check of the products of these universities gives little or nothing to be proud of.
There is no doubting the fact that the failure of the public university system to adequately address multiple problems such as access, quality, funding, strikes, cultism, instability of the academic calendar due to frequent industrial action are the basis for the Federal Government’s decision to approve the establishment of private universities.
The motive behind the approval for the establishment of private universities was for the improvement of the quality of education and the quality of graduates in the labour market. Employers have over time complained that majority of graduates in the labour markets are unemployable due to the quality of impartation they got from the ivory towers.
What we unfortunately have are private universities charging exorbitant fees with little value for the money paid by parents and guardians of these children.
IMPACT NEWS check shows that in spite the sky-high fees charged by these schools there is no meaningful impact in the tertiary education sector. For a fact, no Nigerian tertiary education institution is featured in the 2021 world university ranking the top 400 universities across the globe.
A recent study found out that the private universities are prohibitively expensive for the majority of qualified but indigent prospective applicants.
It is therefore important that government must lead from the front by ensuring that the quality of education in all public tertiary education institutions are improved with all impediments to quality education removed to improve access to quality tertiary education in the country and making employable employers into the labour market.
Also, the kind of quality education expected of private should make provision for special scholarship programmes designed for special student aid programme, accompanied by a traceable and institutionalised repayment system based on models found in certain developed countries.
