COLUMNS

What is your degree worth?

By Daily Dispatch April 10, 2022 191

By KKunle Awosiyan

Today, a university graduate rides Okada so that he can eat. Some of them teach in private schools and earn about N20,000 as salary. There are graduates as police recruits that take N150 as daily allowance.

Of course there are lucky ones who get good job and earn as high as N100, 000. And there are some who have ventured into small scale businesses to feed themselves.

There are millions of graduates that are unemployed, yet they must eat. Each of these set of graduates must have known the worth of their degrees by now. And for those who did not earn degrees or diplomas but work and earn good salaries or are business owners, to them paper qualifications have its limitations where money speaks.

I was with a friend on Friday whose daughter is now in part four at a private university. She gained admission the same year as my son who is still in part two at a public university.

The regular ASUU strike in public universities has kept him in the same class but my friend’s daughter will soon graduate. While I see the frustration on the face of my son and think of the next step to take to help him, the story from some private varsities are not also encouraging. The best any parent can do for his child is to enroll him or her in foreign university. It requires a lot of money or special grace and brilliance for scholarship.

My friend lamented that he was not happy with the conduct of her daughter’s mates. As he put it, “I have visited her on a few occasions and I don’t like the way the students in that school relate with people. They are spoilt brats. I told my daughter to always remember whose child she is.”

He said he had conducted interviews for various universities and Polytechnics graduates and concluded that their performances depended more on individual brilliance instead of the name or type of the institution they had attended.

The best of education is in a good character, without which the certificate will be useless at some stages in life, he noted.

For me, regular interaction with graduates of tertiary institutions over the years made me to conclude that it is going to be difficult for poor parents to give quality education to their children.

Successive administrations in this country have succeeded in killing university education by their policies and lack of interest. Parents who have their children in public universities feel the frustration the most. Government officials, business and political elites whose children school abroad are less concerned about the plights of lecturers and students on our public campuses.

Polytechnics hardly go on strike but most children do not want to enroll for technical education because university rather than serving as a citadel of learning has become a thing of class. It is the name that matters even if the programme is not sellable.

Their words, “I’m a graduate of UNILAG, I studied Religion Knowledge sounds better than I’m a graduate of Yabatech, I studied Computer Engineering”. Doesn’t it. It is laughable but most parents and the country love it that way. This in a way does not mean a graduate of Bible Study cannot become a good banker. It all depends on his creativity in the open market if given the opportunity to exhibit it.

Nevertheless, the future of varsity education is in private institutions and it is going to be for the moneybags. Professors, including the retired ones are being poached by private universities but with strong regulations to total obedience to their employers.Unlike in public universities where lecturers have weaponised industrial strike as the only way to protest against government, you dare not try that in private schools.

In the midst of this, there is serious problem of brain drain. Those lecturers who cannot leave the country roam the campuses to keep their pensions and jump at every call for strike action. This is bad.

The results are half-baked graduates who have spent six or seven years to run a programme of four years. They are already frustrated. What is the worth of a degree that is acquired under tension, fast and prayers?

Our undergraduates spend more time praying than reading. Our lecturers spend more time protesting than researching. Our government spends more time dialoguing than funding the varsities.