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| Abimbola Adelakun |
In
recent times, a number of newspaper editorials have poured scorn on the
trend in Nigerian private universities to award first class honours
degrees. The thrust of their argument is that private universities have
deregulated the degree such that they award it to students liberally as
if it were expired calendars. The argument they put forward is, indeed,
reasonable: when tertiary education in Nigeria had a far higher quality,
first class honours were rare. Now that the standard of education has
fallen so badly, the corresponding number of the degrees awarded has
curiously shot up.
Nowadays, they argue, with enough cash
in hand to send one’s child or ward to a private university, there is a
higher guarantee that the kid would return with a far more marketable
degree than what he would have obtained in a public institution; that
private universities take away the high bar students are supposed to
scale, replace it with an inferior one and consequently churn out first
class honours degrees without their recipients exerting their bodies and
souls enough to make such a coveted degree. In the end, the first class
honours degree is like some kind of pure water – so commonplace that
its essence is depreciated.
Therefore, they propose a form of
regulation to the rate at which these degrees are awarded so that a
higher standard of education can be maintained. To them, a first class
degree should mean what it is, not a payback for an egregiously priced
tuition fee. These are pretty interesting arguments and they deserve
some attention, considering that the public university – a few of them,
at least – is one of the last few places that one is likely to come
across a functional degree in public institutions these days.
As private institutions burgeon – and
they will – and the government continues to watch public universities
fester, they will begin to displace public schools until they eventually
supplant them in the same way that it happened at the primary and
secondary school levels. One of the obituaries of public universities –
and hopefully that time will never come – will be the issue of the class
of degrees they award vis a vis emerging market reality.
To buttress the point about the
disparity between public and private universities in the award of first
class honours degrees, here are a few random examples from public
universities in the past one year: University of Lagos, 3.25 per cent;
University of Ibadan, 2.24 per cent; Kaduna State University, 1.2 per
cent; Ahmadu Bello University, 0.67 per cent; University of Benin, 1 per
cent; Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, 0.57 per cent; Obafemi Awolowo
University, 0.84 per cent.
Compare this to figures from private
universities in the same period: Bells University, 6.15 per cent; Benson
Idahosa University, 5.62 per cent; Covenant University, 7.9 per cent;
Babcock University, 3.88 per cent; Adeleke University, 8.8 per cent;
Landmark University, 10.35 per cent.
The differences are quite glaring and
while we can make a beeline for the familiar (and even prejudiced)
argument of differing standards between public and private institutions,
I believe no one can make an intelligent conclusion without some
objective means of critically evaluating both places.
Do public universities really have a
higher standard of evaluating students, thus resulting in a fewer award
of first class honours degrees? Or do private universities, buoyed by
market competition and the desire for higher enrolment figures, provide
better resources for their students in order to be able to attain first
class standards?
It would be helpful to know what is
really going on so that we do not confuse dysfunctional and inoperable
institutional rigidity for ‘high standards’. The absence of an empirical pole to
plank one’s conclusion notwithstanding, grade inflation is a reality in
privately run schools. And I am not just talking about Nigeria. It
happens rather frequently in the United States, which has the most
highly ranked universities in the world. Grade inflation became such a
worrisome issue that, at some point, an Ivy League institution like
Princeton University had to recommend a cap on the percentage of the A
grade that could be awarded to students. Even in another Ivy League like
Harvard, inflating grades to give students a leg up in the job market
is an established fact.
The problem is that when education
becomes a commodity, customers have to be always right. That kind of
capitalist transactional mindset is rather dangerous for an enterprise
like education. But then, consider that nobody pays a hefty sum of money
to go to the university only to be handed a certificate that they
cannot even use to eat. Something has to give and often the side that
yields is that of the supplier who needs to keep the market happy.
Recall that some years ago, the
Vice-Chancellor of Babcock University, Prof. James Makinde, declared
that their school would never award a third class or a pass degree. One
cannot blame the VC for being responsive to marketing reality, although
the question of how much they prioritise functional employability over
learning remains. In the bid to usher students through the classroom,
packaged and ready for the job market, do they mortgage knowledge,
education, sound reasoning and character for those pre-paid
certificates?
The argument about using the rate of
first class honours degrees as a yardstick for measuring a university’s
standards can be made for and against public and private institutions.
One can make an example of the case of Ayodele Daniel Dada, the young
man who made a perfect score of 5.0 in the University of Lagos recently.
According to the university administrators, the young man broke a
record, accomplishing a feat that no one had ever done in the history of
the university. His achievement is no mean deed and I congratulate him
on this outstanding success. I read it somewhere that he got job offers
from several multinationals. I hope the University of Lagos also had the
good judgment to offer him a job too, along with a fully funded
scholarship to immediately pursue a postgraduate degree. That kind of
brain should be seduced with generous offers so that he is retained
within the institution to produce others like him.
Once the buzz about Dada’s success dies
down, we should also ask why it took the entire lifespan of a university
for someone to attain its highest academic achievement at the
undergraduate level. Rather than presume that this is simply a case of
high academic standards coinciding with individual genius, we should
engage other possibilities that make such a goal almost an overreach in
Nigerian universities: inbuilt academic eugenics that manifests in
unsupportive institutional structure – sadistic lecturers who deflate
(or in some cases, withhold) grades; poor and dilapidating
infrastructure; bureaucracies and administrative arrogance; inexistent
means of institutional redress; and an overall lousy and disinterested
attitude in the students’ progress.
The last point, I must say, is common in
Nigerian public universities mainly because their enrolment figures are
guaranteed to increase yearly whether they are efficient or not. School
funding and other privileges are not tied to students’ experience.
Therefore, they can afford the condescending manner they deal with
students.
As a product of a Nigerian university
myself and one who has dealt with students in various capacities over
the years, I know that public universities have a tendency to treat
knowledge and the acquisition of it like some encrypted data that should
be kept inaccessible until there comes along a lone genius that can
hack into the firewall of impenetrable institutional structure and do
the virtually impossible. What they call “standards” in Nigerian
tertiary institutions need to be interrogated, not merely surmised. This
deserves a rigorous study, not a surface assessment using the first
class honours degree that they award as a benchmark. In the Ivy Leagues
of this world, students make perfect scores far more regularly than they
do in Nigerian universities and nobody can successfully argue that this
disparity is simply because our universities have a higher standard.
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