Whenever I reflect on graduate joblessness these days, I cannot but recall the good old days when there were more jobs than graduates. My employment history reflected the spirit of the times. Upon my completion of secondary school education at Olofin Anglican Grammar School, Idanre, the School Principal, the late Mr. Titus Adeola Oke, gave me a hybrid employment to teach literature in form two and also assist him in his office, even before the West African School Certificate examination results were released.
Years later, after completing my degree in English at the University of Ife, a job was waiting for me at the same secondary school. However, by September of that same year, I was called back to Ife to start my university teaching career. These early encounters with the job market were replicated over and over again throughout my career. I was headhunted for all my teaching and research positions at home and abroad. The truth is that every graduate I knew at that time had a job waiting for him or her somewhere. With only five or six universities in Nigeria at that time, there were more job openings than there were university graduates to fill the vacancies. What is more, a number of my contemporaries in secondary school, who did not go to the university, aquired enough transferable skills and self discipline to study via correspondence tuition to become accountants, lawyers, and what have you, and they eventually rose to the top of their professions.
Of course, the population has exploded since my undergraduate days, and higher education institutions have mushroomed out of control. Today, there are 307 universities and 812 Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions in Nigeria, according to latest figures from the National Universities Commission and the National Board of Technical Education, respectively. The TVET institutions include 194 polytechnics; 32 Colleges of Agriculture; 131 Colleges of Health Sciences; 154 Colleges of Nursing Science; 181 Innovation Enterprise Institutions;153 Technical Colleges; and 98 so-called Specialised Institutions. Altogether, there are 1,119 higher education institutions in the country, churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year.
It is estimated that 50 percent or more of graduates from these institutions today are unemployed or underemployed. There are many factors responsible for this unpleasant outcome. First, the unplanned multiplicity of higher education institutions has produced graduates far more than available jobs.
Second, many factories and manufacturing industries, which are major employers of labour, have been shutting down in response to a slowing economy, high interest rates, poor or inadequate infrastructure, and insecurity.
Third, educational standards have been on the decline due to numerous factors, including inadequate staffing, poor remuneration and incentives, lack of necessary equipment and facilities, decrepit infrastructure, and over-population of teaching spaces and labs.
Fourth, institutions have not been keeping their curriculums relevant to the needs of the job market. To complicate matters, today’s graduates are hardly equipped with proper career orientation, which often makes it difficult for them to find a suitable job that matches their qualifications.
Fifth, our graduates are victims of a skills gap. In other words, there is a serious mismatch between the skills and competencies our graduates have and the skills employers need for job vacancies. Such skills or competencies should normally be identified at the beginning of a class lesson, a lab work, or a workshop so that students are keyed into them. Students also should be trained on how to transfer skills from one area of knowledge to another in order to solve a new problem or adapt to a new job situation.
I noticed this knowledge gap in my encounter with some graduates while conducting a workshop for teachers of English in a secondary school. I was astonished that a graduate of English had difficulty reading, understanding, and teaching a literature textbook outside the ones she studied before as a student. I also came across a graduate of statistics, who lacked the basic skills to assist in the analysis of data obtained in an opinion poll.
Sixth, many Nigerian graduates are not sufficiently computer literate for today’s job market. They complete their education without adequate computer skills beyond the use of the telephone and social media Apps. They can use of Google to search for answers to homework assignments all right or hack into other users’ data for fraudulent purposes. But they lack basic knowledge of how computers work and can hardly use productivity software. That is why today, the integration of technology, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation, even in knowledge-based sectors, is displacing workers and contributing to graduate unemployment.
Finally, and I blush each time I must repeat this: Most Nigerian graduates lack basic communicative skills in English, the official language, and the language of white-collar workplaces. This is especially true of graduates of public universities and even worse for polytechnic and other TVET graduates. Sometimes, I wonder whether English was their medium of instruction at all or how they succeeded if it was!
I must add, however, that the various problems discussed above are not peculiar to Nigeria. These same factors also account for graduate unemployment across the globe. Nevertheless, the problems vary from country to country. So is the rate of unemployment. For example, on the one hand, university graduate unemployment rate is relatively high in the United States, where the rate is now about the same as the unemployment rate for those without university education.
On the other hand, university graduate unemployment in Britain and the European Union is lower than that of the United States, with significant variations from country to country. A major reason for the difference is in the alignment of skills acquired in European universities and the job market.
What is important for Nigeria is to tackle these problems headlong. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has taken several major steps in this direction. First, he put a seven-year moratorium on the establishment of universities in the country to halt the overproduction of university graduates. The moratorium should be generalised across all higher education institutions. Besides, a thorough survey of all higher institutions in the country should be carried out with a view to closing failed institutions or merge failing ones with more successful or bigger institutions in order to consolidate resources.
Second, President Tinubu has ordered the final revision and implementation of secondary education curriculum to better prepare students for entry into higher educational institutions.
Third, he ordered a focus on TVET education, with attention on skills acquisition. Under the astute management of Professor Duke Okoro, the Rector, the young Federal Polytechnic, Orogun, Delta State, has invested in skills acquisition and skills transfer from the beginning, which enabled the institution recently to win first place in national engineering competition on ‘Applying Engineering Solutions to Tanker Explosion and Fire Outbreak.’
But a lot more still needs be done. The remuneration of teachers across the education sector is long overdue for upward revision in light of current economic realities. There should be more effort on job creation through greater investment in infrastructure beyond road construction. More attention should be given to power and water supply as well as recreational facilities.
The need to enhance security is also critical to attracting investment and creating a path to reindustrialisation. Still more effort should be made to make state and local goverments more responsible for education.
Finally, it is necessary to inject new blood into the civil service and encourage old hands to retire quietly. This is one way to initiate changes in existing civil service culture with all its problems, while also creating jobs for new graduates.