By Ibrahim M. Hadejia
Individuals’ credentials galore are the main obstacle confronting Nigeria’s education and learning outcomes. I had the privilege, in 2010, to work with a team of freelance researchers to launch empirical investigation into post-secondary school education ‘outcomes’ in Nigeria using multivariate regression model, with key controllable input variables. It is part of the issues, findings and recommendations of the research that form a substantial part of this article.
Education is an investment that can help foster economic growth, contribute to personal social development and reduce social inequality. Like any investment, it involves both costs and returns. Some of the returns are monetary, and directly related to the labor market, while others are personal, social, cultural or more broadly economic. Some returns accrue to the individual while others benefit society in general in the form of a more literate, rational, intelligent, and productive population.
At present, the Nigerian economy is being confronted by global, technological, and demographic shifts, each of which has serious skills implications.
In the emerging knowledge-based and globalized economy, a nation’s primary competitive advantage will lie in the strategic use of human resources which is a byproduct of education. Whenever Nigerian “fresh-graduates” are seen discussing in clusters, noticeably during their idle NYSC scheme, the major issue of discourse is centered on ‘grading dementia’; hey! My guy, with what grade did you graduate? I made a First class.
What of your friend? He made Second class upper and so on. This is wonderful. I have berated the Nigerian university grading system, not on account of computational problems but on the ground that it is self-defeating and devoid of productive imperative. The essence is to match grading outputs with expected learning outcomes.
Improving Nigeria’s competitive position means ensuring that Nigerian workers have the skills, knowledge and supportive environment needed to excel, to contribute to innovation, and to remain flexible and resilient in the face of ever-changing work demands.
We investigate the impact of education on economic growth in Nigeria during 1980-2010 using an error-correction mechanism. The results show a quasi-educated labor force having a significantly negative impact on economic growth. The wave of official corruption validates this position. The transformation of certificated beings into treasury looters in Nigeria does not justify the moral basis of education. Consistent with micro-economic studies for Nigeria, primary and secondary education are most important for productivity growth.
These findings are robust while changing the conditioning set of the variables, controlling for data issues and endogeneity. Due to an environment of social and political corruption, however, total factor productivity has been slightly negative for the past decades, and there is evidence of a missing complementarity between the country’s skills and its technology base.
I have developed a growth-economics framework which takes into account quality changes of physical capital, and differentiation by level of education. It shows that the human capital variables explain more than 50 percent of output growth. Of these, secondary education is the predominant determinant of growth in Nigeria. The reason is that our over-grading and grading-sensitive scholars are poised to seeking white-collar jobs that guarantee them easy passage to public treasury. The farmers and artisans and drivers who contribute over 80% of GDP are majorly of secondary school level.
There are several approaches to measuring quality education: periodic internal or external reviews of Faculties/Institutions, ranking systems, accreditation systems, and innovativeness in research and student surveys. None of these seem to have been used to estimate the relationships suggested by my model.
In particular, most quality measures use inputs and processes as if these were the outcomes. For example, the NUC system for ranking Nigerian universities places substantial emphasis on the number of faculties with Ph.D. certified teachers, entry averages of students, expenditures, class sizes and a host of other input measures in developing their composite rankings. This represents an explicit attempt to treat inputs as if they were outcomes. Only a couple of indicators, such as the “reputational survey, integrity quotient, and student’s originality of intellect” emphasize on outcomes and these suffer from significant methodological difficulties. These variables are useful and fundamental but often neglected.
Comparative studies are possible at the senior secondary and post-secondary level because individuals can be found with widely varying levels of exposure to higher education, including no exposure. Indeed, this is the thrust of most research under the human capital earnings function. However, the selective nature of the post-secondary system, and the further selection factors in getting post-secondary education to the work place, introduce confounding factors that have not yet been well enough sorted out to determine the causal effects of higher education and especially the causal effects of what has been learned, as opposed to having earned a credential.
However, it seems unlikely that any system or institution could be persuaded to conduct such an experiment. There is need for public and professional validation of outcomes, for priority setting among outcomes and for research designed to assess public and professional views on the range of outcomes to be measured. There is also a need, first to identify and validate a set of common outcomes expected of graduates from core post-secondary programmes in Nigeria.
Hadejia wrote from NOUN, Gusau Study Centre, Zamfara State.
