A recent tweet by Dipo Awojide, founder @BTDTHub and a senior lecturer in strategy, careers, employability and SME made Ota-based Covenant University to trend last week.
“Why are Covenant University grads doing relatively better than grads from other institutions in Nigeria?” Awojide asked.
After 37, 240 votes were cast, 20.1 percent believed it was academic knowledge/skills; 22 percent held that it is mentality and mindset that made the difference. Networking abilities garnered 27.3 percent of votes while 30.6 percent voted for influential parents as the determining factor for CU graduates.
Why always Covenant University? “Well, because they produce some of the most employable graduates all over Nigeria. And this isn’t about academic performance. It is about commercial awareness, networking skills and general exposure. We should be having these discussions,” Awojide said.
A study using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed that while many disadvantaged students succeed at school, socioeconomic status is associated with significant differences in performance in most countries and economies that participate in PISA. Advantaged students tend to outscore their disadvantaged peers by large margins.
The strength of the relationship varies from very strong to moderate across participating countries, but the relationship does exist in each country. In Australia, students from the highest quartile of socioeconomic background perform, on average, at a level about 3 years higher than their counterparts from the lowest quartile.
Cognitive ability is deemed to be a genetic quality and its effects only influenced to a small degree by schools. Much of the body of research particularly that is generated from large-scale international studies would seem to contradict this reasoning.
“If the role of education is not simply to reproduce inequalities in society then we need to understand what the role of socioeconomic background more clearly,” Sue Thomson, an education researcher said. “While much research has been undertaken in the past 50 years, and we are fairly certain that socioeconomic background has a significant effect on educational achievement, we are no closer to understanding how this effect is transmitted.”
People familiar with Nigeria’s public and private sector universities say for any university to stand out, it must have the right entrepreneurship ecosystem. Nigerian universities need to start to create this atmosphere to produce versatile and readily employable graduates. Someone within the university, not necessarily the vice-chancellor or the dean of the college of business but anybody at all who is passionate about entrepreneurship needs to champion the course.
“I think influential parents and networking ability are the main factors. Individuals from a rich and supportive home are bound to excel even in the face of intimidating odds. These rich families also tend to belong to a network of rich and like-minded fellows,” Chimere Elele Assoc @Chimere_Elele, a PhD candidate at Australia’s University of Wollongong tweeted.
Some graduates of Covenant University have pointed out in a fury of tweets that the university is home to students from divergent socioeconomic backgrounds, contradicting the view that only children of influential parents can afford to send their wards to the school.
“There were people who only ate garri and indomie and people who were on David Oyedepo scholarships. The Student Council sometimes had to crowdsource funds to pay fees of students nearly every session and provided welfare support for some. Not all had influential and wealthy parents, many didn’t,” @rotimi_olopade tweeted.
On BusinessDay’s recent list of Nigeria’s top 10 most expensive universities, Covenant University ranked 6th, sandwiched between Skyline University in Kano State (5th) and Adeleke University in Osun State (7th).
At Covenant University in Ota, Ogun State, the most expensive course of study is Accounting at N857, 500. The school was founded in 2002.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
