Graduate employability: time to take action

Recently, Wale Omole, former Vice Chancellor at OAU, declared that the fundamental issue for us in our education system is the content of instruction, which was developed for us since about 1900AD.We received a post industrial curriculum for a pre industrial society. In his opinion, we need to “move from knowledge acquisition to competency building”. I agree completely.

And it is not just the curriculum that is deficient, how lecturers teach is also an issue of concern .U.S based Prof. Adebimpe says “a lot of lecturers apart from still seeing life as it was back then
[they] still use the same college notes of many years ago to teach their students.”  We say the curriculum is not right for us, and we compound the problem with outdated methods of teaching?

How can the products of an antiquated system be relevant in a modern day economy?

Our graduates are unable to secure jobs because the education they acquired has not equipped them with the skills needed in the labour market. As entrepreneurial as we are in Nigeria, that our graduates are also unable to successfully start and build viable businesses may actually be an indicator that they have been ‘mistrained’ by our education system, seeing as we have a good number of successful entrepreneurs who did not go to school!

Hopefully, I’d like to believe that the regulators at the NUC and NBTE are aware of these deficiencies, but I do not understand why we have we not started taking coherent steps to address the issue that sits at the core of our youth unemployment challenge. Why does the NUC continue to carry on enforcing and “quality assuring” processes that have been proven time and time over to be antiquated and ineffective?

Why are university administrators seemingly turning a blind eye to the fact that they are selling the nation a dummy by producing graduates who are not fit for purpose, thereby compounding an already difficult problem? BusinessDay’s headline on August 28, 2015 was titled “How Nigeria’s university system fails in administration, value delivery”

The paper quotes education experts as saying that “Nigeria’s university system fails in administration and value delivery” Visitation panels, which are supposed to monitor the performance of university governing councils, vice chancellors and principal officers, have not been effective and allegations of improper dealings or misconduct are rife. Do tertiary institutions have audited accounts? Are those accounts easily accessible? Can we overhaul the financial reporting process and begin to demand properly conducted annual audits from all tertiary institutions, if we do not already have such a process in place?

Governance processes should be strengthened. Governing council performance should be audited; university strategic plans should be evaluated in terms of performance. If the vehicle for doing this has to continue to be the visitation panels, then these panels should be properly constituted, empowered and their reports acted upon or the appraisal process for university governing councils and administrators overhauled completely. We have no right to complain about underfunding in the tertiary education system if we have not been judiciously utilizing the funding available and applying such to the right purposes.

News emanating from TETFUND itself corroborates the assertion that all is not well with financial management in our tertiary institutions and TETFUND itself may not have been keeping faith with its own criteria.

The agency claims there are funds that institutions have not been able to access because beneficiary institutions were not able to account for how they utilized earlier disbursements. Under its procedure for disbursement of funds; institutions are to account for previous allocations before accessing new ones. Interventions for construction projects are released in three tranches (50%, 35%, and 15%) while interventions for procurement are released in two instalments (85%,  15%).
However, in a 2013 presentation, the then Executive Secretary listed major challenges faced by TETFUND as including the inability of some beneficiary institutions to adopt sound management principles, lack of connection between projects and institutions’ objectives and none or partial compliance with requirements for due process, hence stalling the release of other tranches, even for projects for which initial funding had been disbursed. But one of the key requirements for accessing TETFUND intervention is that it must be in line with the university’s mandate (Transforming the Education Sector: The Role of TETFUND, Mallam Aliyu Na’iya, Ag Executive Secretary, 2013) In the Broad Principles for accessing TETFUND interventions, Item 3 stipulates that “submission of proposed projects to the Fund to the sum of the allocated amount must be in line with the institution’s core mandate and should be relevant to teaching, learning and research; including the learning and teaching environment” (Guidelines for Accessing TETFUND Intervention Funds, May 2015) How then can the same agency turn round to complain of a lack of connection between projects and institutions’ objectives (or mandate) How did such projects scale through the approval process in the first place? What guarantee do we have that each individual university’s “core mandate” is aligned to our national development priorities? This mismatch corroborates Business Day’s findings about the shoddy arrangements for visitation panels, the weaknesses of the tertiary institutions’ governance structures and the possibility of contract awards being made to satisfy some interests and not necessarily in accordance with the universities’ objectives, shortchanging both the tax payers whose taxes pay for the interventions and the students who are receiving education that is not up to par. The big question therefore is; should more money be made available for spending without first cleaning up the system?

What is taking place or has taken place at TETFUND should be of interest to all stakeholders interested in curbing graduate unemployment. TETFUND says it is the key agency for actualizing the Ministry of Education’s Strategic Plan in the focal area on Funding, Partnerships, Resource Mobilization and Utilization, towards accomplishing the objectives of the Nigeria education system, which are to address the challenges of access and quality and develop world-class infrastructure, learning resources and world-class teachers and to ensure that the institutions are able to produce highly skilled manpower and individuals with entrepreneurial flair (emphasis mine). There are ongoing moves to increase education tax from 2 to 4%. If we have not received significant value from 2%, what hope do we have that increasing the revenue base will yield positive results? Four years and N1 trillion later, how ‘world class’ is the manpower we are producing when employers are complaining about severe skill gaps? And how far have we gone in developing “individuals with entrepreneurial flair” when the federal government has openly admitted the failure of current entrepreneurship development programmes?

It is time to rethink how TETFUND has been executing its mandate, which has cost taxpayers so much but yielded so little in return. The loopholes that have allowed people to game the system must be closed and we should focus the bulk of funding interventions, not on what the universities individually say they need, but on providing a specific set of facilities that are in line with revised objectives and goals for tertiary education, which should align with our manpower development needs.

We need to invest significant resources in enlightening and educating our lecturers to adopt 21st century methods. And the means should not be one (or several) of those interminable jamborees, by whatever name they call it, ”seminars” and “workshops” etc. Can we apply more TETFUND grants to outcomes based capacity building for our lecturers? Why not put resources together on an online portal for educators to access and earn credit or some form of certification for completing the courses that will enable them adopt modern methods of teaching? If we revamp the curriculum to be competency focused, we have to up skill our lecturers to be able to work towards competency-based outcomes, which will match the needs of employers.

How do we embed “metacognition” in the curriculum? How do we train faculty members to embed employability outcomes in their course delivery and to apply the knowledge in their delivery to prepare students for life outside the university walls?

Can we agree the fundamental outcomes that will make students “fit for purpose” upon graduation?  How much interaction is taking place between the “producers” of labour and the end-users, that is, the employers of the graduates our institutions are churning out. It is when we are able to align the curriculum, NUC’s quality assurance, TETFUND interventions and such like with the needs of employers of labour that we can start making some headway. The way it looks now, the activities of these agencies and the institutions themselves are being conducted as if the agencies are oblivious of the skill requirements in our society or they do not have a clue as to how to ensure they can “produce to specification”, that is, produce graduates who are employable. The entire tertiary education curriculum needs an urgent revamp.

In the long run, reviewing our education system will help reduce the challenge of graduate unemployment. Coordination is critical here too.

Driving a change in teaching approach, reviewing the curriculum and developing a robust employability and entrepreneurship development programme is beyond the capacity of the NUC and individual universities. Collaboration between the sector and employers is crucial. Also, coordination presumably from the Presidency, will help to underscore the importance of achieving specific outcomes, is required. The CBN, Bank of Industry, TETFUND, NUC, NBTE, National Planning, Labour & Productivity, Trade & Investment, SMEDAN, NECA, NESG and other relevant stakeholders should all be involved in developing an integrated approach to tackle this challenge.

If we can put more people into jobs, and enable others to start businesses which will also employ other people, then we can grow the size of our economy because we will be creating more purchasing power. That is the path of prosperity. Where we are now and where we are heading if we do not fix this problem in a holistic and effective manner is scary, very scary.

 

Tope Toogun