Human capital or infrastructure? (III)

As I was doing my master’s in psychology at University Putra Malaysia (UPM) and also a foreign correspondent for the Daily Trust newspaper, I wanted to know the secret of Malaysia – I wanted to know why were people coming from all over the world to study there. Some may say it is leadership, but it would be more instructive to know the formula those leaders used.

“Twenty years ago,” a friend and a fellow student offered to explain, “even fifteen years ago, our country wasn’t like this. Our people were poor,” she told me as we sat behind the Faculty of Education and drank in the breathtaking landscape.

But she couldn’t answer the follow-up questions satisfactorily. So I sought an expert and found that in the vice chancellor of the university, Professor Nik Mustapha R. Abdullah. The VC being an economist helped my case because I assumed he must have done some abstraction to extract the factors responsible for his country’s relative success – and he had.

When we met, only the two of us sat in his office as the professor started to break down the question. But before then, I commented about the beautiful landscaping of the campus. UPM then was famous for having the biggest campus in Malaysia.

“It is too green,” the VC complained, surprising me. “So we’ve decided to spice it up with more colourful plants.” He then told me of his plans of integrating colourful plants.

This innocent comment demonstrates the hunger of the well-educated to carry any project a notch above the status quo – always searching for the next level. It also brings into focus one of the questions that I will attempt to answer today: what will happen if we have too many educated people.

But let’s take a step back to the VC’s office.

“Ibraheem, the secret is education,” the VC said.

“It is also important to build on your strengths. For example, UPM started as a college of agriculture; because of that background, we wanted to make the university a world leader in biotechnology. And we are realising that dream.”

But most importantly “in the 70s and 80s, the nation had a plan for the massive education of its citizens. At a point, in the United States, Malaysia had the largest foreign students population.”

That wasn’t all, he said: they were also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, U.K., Japan, etc.

“When we came back,” the professor said, “the education capacity of Malaysia expanded.”

Now they have universities in the top 180 to 200 in the world; because of that people from around the world go there to study.

The educational capacity didn’t only expand, but also, it was upon these hordes of human capital bouncing home from far and near that the government implemented its developmental programmes – including infrastructure.

The story was the same with all the Asian Tigers: Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore.  They realised very early that their development was dependent on educating their people. And they pursued that vision with the tenacity of a pig and ruthlessness of a hyena.

One significant lesson, however, that I learnt from the vice chancellor’s disposition was the idea that while he was proud of what they had accomplished, he wasn’t entirely satisfied as he kept talking about improvement and tinkering.

This wasn’t exactly an original idea. In the 1900s, the Western world implemented the same strategy.

“At the dawn of the 20th century, Western society faced a huge education gap,” Scott Sleek wrote for the Psychological Science. “Most people had a mere 8 years of schooling, with only a few students attending university. Many people didn’t know how to read. Teaching literacy became a prime societal goal in developed countries during the early 1900s, and those education initiatives were highly successful,” Sleek wrote.

Now look at the Western society today.

Why can’t we also implement this tried and true strategy? This strategy is so effective that other countries are using it today.

A case in point is Paraguay. “To help develop human capital,” the finance minister of Paraguay, Benigno Lopez, said last month, “we send our students to the 300 top universities in the world.”

But why this obsession with the best universities? The CEO of the World Bank,  Christalina Georgieva, said  “going to school may not translate to learning. Learning also may not translate to skills and skills may not translate to jobs.”

So if you send your students to the best schools, there’s a reasonable assumption that they know what they’re doing and going to school will translate to jobs and other positive outcomes. You can only make good changes with well-educated individuals not half-baked graduates.

So I’m proposing that the Federal Government should send 20,000 Nigerians to the top 300 universities in the world for master’s degrees and 10,000 for PhDs in the next five years.

The numbers are not based on anything other than the notion that it is what we need to reach a critical mass that will transform both our education and attitudes.

I know many Nigerians who thought they could change things if they returned home, but they couldn’t because they were lone rangers – no support base. But if they can come back in their thousands with best practices, they can do it.

If the government is feeling ambitious, it can similarly train 100,000 undergraduates. But the emphasis is on postgraduate education because they can teach the undergraduates.

Also, this is not entirely new here. TETFUND sponsors our lecturers abroad for postgraduate degrees. Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso sent thousands of kanawa abroad for degrees. But that’s just scratching the surface. We need to do it at scale.

To be continued.