THE ANT TRIBE

There’s no doubt again that employers, citizens, and parents, executives the country are increasingly becoming concerned about the education systems, especially post-secondary school, that are supposed to prepare young people for work and life. The crescendo of concern is shaping public discourse, policy debate, and private experimentation through commitments such as the monetary scholarships made to higher education students by the Atiku Scholarship Board which has been running for quite a while.

So far, I fear, the dialogue is only half a conversation. For example, during the last ASUU strike which lasted for about five months President Jonathan recent promise to “lay out an aggressive strategy to shake up the [tertiary educational] system, tackle rising costs, and improve value for poor students and their families” went over well. No surprise there; when any politician says it is critical to make sure that university is affordable for every single Nigerian who is willing to work for it, heads will nod and hands would clap. Who would argue about making tertiary education more affordable and more accessible? The problem is that such talk leaves much unsaid. The underlying assumption is that because tertiary education pretty much does the right things — and does them well — the real challenge society faces is to make sure that all who desire a tertiary education have fair and affordable access to it. I do not question the importance or the difficulty of the challenge; I question the basic assumption. Most often, that assumption doesn’t even get discussed. When it is, what we hear is the emphatic argument that tertiary education works because it does pay, which is supported by data like that gathered by the National Population Commission’s most recent compendium of education-related data, Education at a Glance 2013, which covers the period through 2011. The data show a pushy rise to 23.9% in the unemployment rate among graduates in the country, but that’s far lower than the 44% for individuals of comparable age but without tertiary education.

In Nigeria today, over a working lifetime, 4+ year university graduates (plus one year National Youth Corp Service) will earn 84% more than those who just completed secondary school. This represents a great benefit to people individually as well as to society, which stands to gain from the taxes they will pay and the unemployment and other forms of support they will not need. What’s missing from this happy banter is an equal level of attention to how few students make it through university, how little they actually learn, and how poorly many of them do in finding the well-paying work for which their education prepares them. In Nigeria, although more than two-thirds of those in the appropriate age cohort begin programs at four-year colleges, a third do not finish. Equally disturbing, graduation rates among economically advantaged families are much higher than among those lower down on the economic pyramid, and the gap between them is growing. Every bit as troubling is the performance of universities in developing the critical thinking skills and capabilities so important to life and work.

Persian Hill Consult, an educational consultancy, used the Collegiate Learning Assessment tool — a statistical instrument being used by the OECD for its 17-country Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) Project, which is assessing student knowledge and abilities in higher education — to draw a clear line in the sand. After surveying 1, 653 university students, the outfit found that at least 52% of them showed absolutely no statistically significant improvement in their critical thinking skills after their first two years in school. Reports from other countries show a consistent, and growing, disconnect between the fast-rising number of students graduated and the shrinking percentage that find work. A survey of recent graduates from China’s famed Tsinghua University revealed that some two- thirds were working for entry-level wages lower than those paid to migrant workers. The same is true for Nigeria only that in her case graduates earn lower than “technical” migrant workers who are usually from China and India, cumulating what is dismissively spoken of as the “ant tribe” in closed circles.

The point is simple: Conversations about university must address more than just cost and access. They must also question assumptions of quality, performance, and relevance. This is uncomfortable and unwelcome ground. But for many students in many places, university is no longer doing well what it was designed to do — and what it was designed to do may no longer be what students most need or what societies most need of them. We need to talk about that too. Policy makers and executives need to do more about these issues than just talk or exert influence as alumni or school trustees. They know well that only what gets effectively measured gets properly managed. After all, universities need access to tangible, ground-level information showing the correlation between the curriculum and learning experiences they provide and real-world outcomes in terms of usable skills and capabilities. Universities can’t fix things if they, too, have access only to half a conversation. Businesses can, and must, supply the other half.