Reexamining the True Essence of University Education in Nigeria

Any country’s higher education system is intended to serve as a vital arm of the state, educating the populace about the components of social harmony and order while also connecting them to the state’s development priorities and policies. To put it another way, a country’s higher education system is one of the most important tools for defining and articulating its paths to prosperity and advancement. The dynamics of higher education are significantly influenced by the university system. For this reason, postsecondary education is frequently in line with national goals all around the world. This is made extremely explicit in the Nigerian National Policy on Education. Within the broader framework of education, tertiary education is intended to accomplish the following goals: “(a) contribute to national development through high level manpower training; (b) provide accessible and affordable high quality learning opportunities in formal and informal education in response to the needs and interests of all Nigerians; (c) provide high quality career counseling and lifelong learning programs that prepare students with the knowledge and skills for self-reliance and the world of work; (d) reduce skill shortages through the production of skilled manpower relevant to the needs of the labor market; (e) promote and encourage scholarship, entrepreneurship, and community service; (f) forge and cement national unity; and (g) promote national and international understanding and interaction.
Higher education’s ability to mediate learning and growth for Nigerians and the Nigerian state has been weakened by a number of dysfunctional fissures that have developed within Nigeria’s educational and tertiary system over the country’s lengthy, sixty-six-year evolution. In order to identify what has gone wrong, two critical indicators are essential. The first is the dreadful distance that exists between the Nigerian academic and intellectual elite, which drives the country’s higher education system, and the government. This anti-intellectualism makes sure that the policy architecture of the government does not profit from policy intelligence produced by think tanks and universities. The reduction of postsecondary education to the attainment of degrees, certificates, and diplomas is the second symptom. Thus, the certification frenzy in Nigeria suggests that universities release graduates into the workforce who lack the necessary foundation to significantly alter the country’s socioeconomic structure or impact its national objectives. As a result, manpower development lost its crucial and useful edge and eventually crumbled due to priorities that were not aligned.
To put it succinctly, colleges have lost touch with their original purpose, which is a vital way to conceive the dysfunction of the higher education system and its separation from Nigeria’s national aspirations. When combined with Nigeria’s extremely large youth population, human capital, and potential for citizenship, this becomes extremely disruptive. With more than 60% of its population under thirty, Nigeria is among the youngest nations in the world. This suggests more than just that young people are undergraduate and graduate students at universities. Additionally, it indicates that Nigeria has a sizable pool of human resources that might be used to advance the country.

These facts guarantee that the university system has been rehabilitated by successive Nigerian governments in order to address its dysfunction and reroute its dynamics toward better functionality on behalf of the Nigerian state and her society. The success of these initiatives is yet up in the air. We don’t seem to have made much progress, as seen by the depressing youth unemployment numbers. Therefore, the reformer in me says that the university system needs to undergo an urgent and significant overhaul. This reforming will take place at the nexus of innovation and creativity, youth demography, technology advancement, and governance.
In his attempt to capture the core of higher education, American novelist Adam Grant is quite accurate. “The knowledge you acquire in your head is not the mark of higher education,” he said. It’s the knowledge you acquire about learning. In my brief 2010 monograph, The Joy of Learning, which explores what it means to learn both inside and outside of the formal tertiary dynamics, this essential argument is presented persuasively. According to Grant, reconsidering our existing conception of education and the university system is necessary to grasp what learning actually entails—that is, what it means to gain abilities that enable one to learn. As it stands, our comprehension of higher education is dependent on the system’s ability to produce skilled labor. This ambition is perfectly acceptable. Otherwise, we will either be producing robots in the workplace who lack empathy and spirituality, or we will be discarding graduates who, despite their skills and abilities, lacked morality and compassion.
Two questions must be asked in order to have a proper understanding of education and how the university can support it for the benefit of both the Nigerian state and its citizens. Since the main focus of education is on the youth and their capacity to change the course of any society or state, these questions are pertinent. What are we training Nigerian kids for, then, is the first question. How are we preparing them for that future? is the second question. These two inquiries should help guide the current restructuring of Nigeria’s university system. The first question requires a paradigm shift in thinking about the purpose of education and how the institution may be changed to achieve it. Employment and credentials are not the main purposes of education. This is better expressed by Wendel Berry than I could have: “Humanity is the thing being developed in a university. [W]The goal of universities is to create or assist in creating human beings in the broadest meaning of the word—not merely skilled laborers or informed citizens, but also responsible heirs and members of human society. The notion that good work and good citizenship are natural byproducts of creating a good—that is, a fully developed—human being is the foundation of the idea of a university, which unites all the fields into one. Nigeria has a great chance to reestablish contact with its kids and create a capable and trustworthy citizenry that serves as the cornerstone of social order if this knowledge is put into practice. Thus, a fundamental shift in the definition of education equips Nigerian young for a future in which they may fully engage with what it means to be a Nigerian human.
Therefore, the higher education system should strike a balance between developing people’s character and their skills. And this brings us to the crucial dynamics of change management that will enable the university system to support transformation for the Nigerian state as part of the broader framework of higher education. The second question’s main focus is on how to get young people ready for that human future. This question necessitates recalibrating the university system in a way that allows us to reconsider and redefine what education actually entails. Let’s center the crucial reform concerns on the following queries: (i) Should universities give priority to knowledge generation, skill development, employability, and social mobility in terms of relevance? (ii) How does technology affect and influence research, teaching, and learning in the framework of online and hybrid methods for delivering educational services? (iii) In light of the expanding globalization of education and the burgeoning knowledge society, how can the university system strike a balance between cross-disciplinary research and learning and the conventional disciplinary boundaries, which are becoming restrictive? (iv) Which funding schemes and governance models can best support Nigeria’s developing model of sustainable funding and university autonomy? (v) How can the institution balance the broad and basic importance of the humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts with the critical rise of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields? (vi) How can colleges put the necessary balance between adult education and ongoing skill development first as a crucial tactic to help the economy deal with the rate at which technology makes skills outdated in a highly globalized labor market? (vii) Without sacrificing their research agenda and academic integrity, how can the university system support and expand research and development (R&D) as well as entrepreneurship education that is based on innovation and industry partnership?
Overemphasizing education as a return on investment is necessary, especially in a critical postcolonial setting like Nigerian society, even though it addresses the country’s development goals and even parents’ desire for a purpose for their kids. We need to be prepared by education to coexist with others who are not our own gender, position, race, or religion in any setting we find ourselves in, including our workplace, family, neighborhoods, villages, online communities, and schools. An education that reconnects Nigerian kids to their humanity and prepares them for life has the added benefit of preparing them to deal with the problems of the modern world. In order to help Nigeria enter the information society and the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions, for example, such an education equips students to deal with life’s challenges and the demands of new technology and innovation. We may then be confident that learning has begun to be implemented in the higher education system. And in the era of artificial intelligence, we have begun a future in which young Nigerians would have begun to ask important concerns about not only coexisting and acting morally with one another, but also with clever computers.

• Taken from a speech given on January 30, 2026, by Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, in his capacity as Chairman of the Federal University of Agriculture (FUNAAB), Abeokuta’s 2026 Convocation Lecture Program.