Chance is that, on papers you are more educated than late Sir Ahmadu Bello (Sardauna of Sokoto), Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and Michael Ibru combined; but the same papers have failed to make you as productive.
Curiously, while basking in the euphoria of such possession, i.e. having multiple certificates/ higher degrees, unemployment rate continues to be on the rise – a reminder that something is fundamentally wrong with our educational system. There is gross mismatch between the job market demands and the skill sets/training offered by our educational system. Typically, it takes 3-4 years to complete an engineering bachelor degree in Europe and USA, ours typically lasts for 5 years, but that does not make our graduates more productive. For the right or wrong reasons, many people are increasingly demanding that we should reduce the length of our engineering degree programs since the longer period has not made our graduates any better.
What are we doing wrong?
To provide a context, this brief note was prompted by a Facebook post made by a friend. I initially intended to add one of those casual comments within that limited context but eventually saw the need to put out the comment to wider audience. Hence, I have slightly expanded the theme of the original post. Now, back to the topic, well, we may go for the 3 year bachelor degree programme but with a 2 year compulsory postsecondary school advanced studies, which is essentially how the UK does it.
UK’s educational system is still largely anchored on the model: 6-5-2-3 (=16), implying that high school is completed in 5 years, plus 2 pre-degree advanced studies. With this model, students will only be exposed to the Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) system after proper grounding. The post high school period (2 years) is preparatory and serves as a medium for advancing students’ cognitive capacity and also to further distinguish between those looking to measure in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and those that will proceed on the conventional path. We were using the 6-5-4 (=15) colonial model up to around 1982.
Thereafter, Nigeria switched to the 6-3-3-4 (=16) American model which was meant to produce graduates that would be able to use the 3Hs, i.e. their Hands, Head and Heart.
We remained on that up to 2008 when the 9-3-4 (=16) model took off ‘actively’. (The Universal Basic Education (UBE) was launched in 1999, but the Bill establishing it was assented to in 2004, providing the legal framework for the 9-3-4 model.)
Clearly, length of study period would only matter if there is a robust plan in place and adequate resource allocation to maximize benefit. I think it is mainly about the choice of intended learning objectives (curricula contents), content delivery methods, assessment methods, teacher quality, available facilities, national educational policies, educational budget and knowing when and where to focus the sources. For instance, duration of compulsory and free (supposedly) education in Nigeria is still 9 years. However, countries like UK observe the 11 year ‘free’ compulsory education; USA observes 13 years while Venezuela, also an oil rich country, sponsors 11 years of ‘free’ education. With millions of parents living in abject poverty, this is one of those areas we need to pay special attention to, but we don’t. Instead, we allocate relatively less resources to non-tertiary education and then prescribe longer study years at the tertiary level where the damage would have been done.
We have NUC to oversee the Universities, NBTE for Poly/Monotechnics, NCCE for Federal Colleges of Education, UBEC for the Basic education, which is capped with Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE)/Junior Secondary Examination.But curiously, we fail to see the sense in establishing a fully dedicated commission to oversee the Senior Secondly School Education. This is where students write SSCE, decide to be in TVET or not, this is where we have the “MIRACLE CENTRES” and students may jump from here directly into the University! And “Mr. Unforgiving” (The CGPA system) is there waiting for them. Worse still, we are still hanging onto those colonial curricula that were never designed to solve our main problems.
What we have now is rather shallowwide curricula – containing a bunch poorly selected and loosely coordinated elements. And somehow, we expect these curricula to turnout graduates that will compete in solving 21st century problems. No wonder, most of our graduates remain unemployable. We need to first define the problems we want our educational system to address, then carefully select curricula elements, delivery approaches and assessment methods to ensure realization of the set goals; which is the main idea behind the concept of Outcome Based Education (OBE).
Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) programs have been shown to be far more efficient in terms of job creation than the conventional education. Countries with higher enrolment in TVET tend to have higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. No wonder many countries are working to achieve 50% secondary school students’ enrolment in TVET. While more than 50% of the upper secondary school students are enrolled in TVET in many of the OECD countries such as Germany, Belgium, Finland and Italy, Nigeria enrolls less than 5%. We have a long way to go! We need a renewed and more strategic commitment to TVET and must be anchored on curricula, content delivery and modern assessment methods that are outcome based.
The problems call for a holistic approach and all hands must be on deck. In particular, NUC, NBTE, NCCE, UBE and the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) need to work together in a carefully coordinated manner. But most importantly, Mr. President should lead the crusade. In Nigeria, successive presidents have granted exclusive attention to the Petroleum Ministry for obvious reasons; accord half of such attention to education and we will go a long way in addressing this problem!
Dr. Usman Abubakar Zaria is a lecturer at the Department of Chemical Engineering,
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. [email protected]
