OPINION | POLICY
More Degrees, Less Direction: The Crisis We’re Not Naming
Nigeria is opening more universities than ever. We celebrate new graduates every year and post photos of convocation ceremonies with much fanfare. Yet quietly, our higher education system is collapsing. Not in form, but in function.
What we are facing is not just a crisis of quality. It is a crisis of purpose.
Between 1999 and 2013, the number of universities in Nigeria tripled from 41 to over 125. Today, there are more than 270 universities (public and private) registered with the National Universities Commission (NUC). But if the measure of education is not how many degrees we award but how well those degrees prepare people for life, then this expansion tells a dangerous lie.
Graduates are underprepared, overburdened, and directionless, not because they lack ambition but because they’ve been victims of a system that confuses motion for meaning. Degrees are being churned out without depth, direction, or design. There’s a growing body of graduates, yet shrinking confidence in the value they carry.
From Knowledge to Commerce: The Startup-ization of Higher Ed
In an attempt to respond to Nigeria’s unemployment crisis, many universities have pivoted toward what looks like a solution: entrepreneurship. Today, nearly every Nigerian university has a compulsory entrepreneurship course. Students learn soap-making, shoe-making, and fashion design — sometimes in their final year of microbiology or sociology.
The underlying assumption is this: since the system can’t provide jobs, students should create their own.
But this approach reflects more panic than planning. While entrepreneurship is important, it is not a substitute for education. Not every student should become a business owner, and certainly not as a Plan B to an ailing economy. The idea that universities should function as glorified skill acquisition centres misunderstands their role in society.
What we are seeing is a quiet shift from knowledge to commerce, from learning to hustling, and from depth to speed. Education is becoming utilitarian, stripped of reflection, creativity, and thought leadership. Yet, history reminds us that the most impactful innovations don't come from shallow enterprise but deep thought, from thinkers, not hustlers.
What happened to Ideology and Identity?
The best universities in the world are not just degree mills. They are intellectual engines. They stand for something. Harvard helped birth liberal institutionalism. The University of Chicago is synonymous with free-market economics. MIT, engineering innovation and Silicon Valley-style technocracy.
What does your university stand for?
In Nigeria, very few institutions can answer that question. There is no intellectual identity, ideological camps, philosophical schools, or research specialisations. Universities try to be everything to everyone and end up being nothing in particular. No school is known as the gold standard for seeds research, public health, or archaeology. Even among the prestigious institutions, the dilution is clear.
An academic declaring that they lecture Law in UNIBEN or Economics in ABU should have some ideological meaning. The kind that dictates the type of thinking about the field that their graduates will likely have. It’s not merely a lack of talent. It’s that we lack academic direction and thematic focus.
This absence creates a vacuum. Students graduate having learned only to pass exams, not to pursue new knowledge, question existing structures, or contribute to intellectual legacies.
The public sector also suffers alongside, confused in deciding policy direction, as the academic community has no schools of thought to shape it. This leaves the country at the mercy of private sector consultants whose approaches tend to lack academic rigour.
The Passive Role of Industry is not Helping
The private sector often complains that Nigerian graduates are “unemployable”. But industry has largely abandoned the education pipeline. Rather than shaping the talent they want, many employers sit at the end of the chain, waiting to harvest what academia produces. Some others have convinced themselves that hiring from specific schools will save them from hiring the unemployables. Their folly would be made bare with time.
Nigerian professionals largely think they have no role to play. Ignoring emails and cold outreaches from students via LinkedIn to speak at events. I recall one of such people going to Twitter to ask people if the road to Ife from Lagos is safe, without ever replying to the email to turn down the engagement. That person will be somewhere making the graduates are unemployable argument, forgetting they failed to engage the talent before they graduated.
But there are glimpses of what’s possible when this changes. For example, OAU’s Tax Club — supported by industry players — has produced some of the finest finance and tax professionals in Nigeria today. UNILAG’s Investment Society is a talent pipeline for the world's largest financial institutions, supported by its alumni who have gotten into those organisations.
What worked? Engagement. Mentorship. Investment. Influence on what students learned and how they applied it.
But these are the exception, not the rule.
Today, few Nigerian companies and professionals meaningfully collaborate with academia. Very few invest in research. Fewer still shape curricula. As a result, we have an education system that produces degrees but not people who are industry-ready or research-driven. The implication is the “banking schools” nearly all Nigerian banks have had to establish.
Graduate school is equally ignored, and this is the most obvious evidence of the decline of university education. Postgraduate enrollment is declining, and with it, our capacity for research and innovation. Remember, it is people with graduate degrees who can lecture. No graduate students, no lecturers. No lecturers, no university.
How many students from your undergraduate class in a Nigerian university went back there for a graduate program?
When students don’t see a future in academia — and academia itself lacks funding, mentorship, and prestige — the knowledge pipeline dries up. We are not just losing talent. We are losing thought.
Rethinking the Purpose of Nigerian Universities
So, where do we go from here?
First, we must stop thinking of universities as job factories. Their purpose is not to reduce unemployment; it is to expand capacity, for thought, for innovation, for national development. If we want vocational training, let us invest in vocational institutes. But let universities do what they were built for: generate and refine knowledge.
Second, we don’t need more universities. We need better ones, with fewer distractions, clearer missions, and a return to real intellectual ambition. The government should place a moratorium on the establishment of new institutions.
Each university should have a thematic focus, a signature area of excellence, linked to national development needs. Imagine FUTO as a national hub for innovation in hardware research, UNILAG for coastal urban policy, UI for healthcare research, and OAU for legal scholarship. Not every school needs to do everything.
OAU recently added Business Administration to its course offerings and converted its Computer Science & Engineering department to a faculty, reflecting the diversion from excellence in specific areas to churning out as many degrees as possible.
Third, industry must play a more active role. Not just by sponsoring events and hosting brand activations, but by adopting departments, mentoring students, investing in research, and influencing curriculum direction. If you want better graduates, help build better universities.
Professionals who are practising with their degrees have ceded space to entrepreneurs selling anti-academic ideas and agendas on campuses. The growing number of students with side hustles is not a good thing, and professionals must actively help discourage it.
Fourth, universities must stop treating their events like glorified showcases of numbers. American innovators speak to single classes all the time. Some Nigerian entrepreneurs have been invited to speak to MBA classes in Ivy League programs.
Drop the “biggest student conference in Africa” nonsense. They aren’t bad, but we need fewer of them. Small events with a small lineup of activities allow for better, quality engagement. They do not have to be physical, this is 2025.
Finally, we must reclaim the soul of higher education. A university is not just a place to get a degree. It is where society thinks, future leaders form convictions, and we debate our collective direction. A society that hollows out its universities will soon find itself without ideas — and eventually, without options.
We are producing more graduates than ever, but giving them less and less to believe in. More degrees, yes, but less direction. And that is the crisis we are not naming.
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