CHAPTER
ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background to the study
A major problem in Nigeria today is
the unemployment of tertiary graduates. There are thousands of students that
graduate every year from various tertiary institutions with good/honorary
degrees; yet without employment. According to the National Bureau of Statistics
(NBS) (2010), unemployment in Nigeria is running at around 19.7 percent on
average… and almost half of 15-24 year olds living in urban areas are jobless.
The secondary-school graduates was said to consist of the principal fraction of
the unemployed, accounting for nearly 35% to 50%; 40% for age group within 20
to 24years and 31% for 15 to 19 years. As imperfect as this statistics may be,
it’s still does not tell a good story.
At a seminar with the theme: Youth,
Employment Creation and Shared Growth in Africa held at the just concluded
African Development Bank (AfDB’s) annual meetings in Lisbon, Portugal, Prof.
Ernest Aryeetey, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, noted that most of
the things students are thought in schools today is quite different from what
is needed in the labour market.
The rate of development in Nigeria
has been on a very slow pace because of this. This slow development has been as
a result of the low rate of production. And the low rate of production has been
adduced to the incompetence of recent tertiary graduates. Questions have arisen
as to why the case is like this. Some adduced reasons were that:
There are three major challenges
currently facing the education sector in the country which apparently are the
reason for the poor performance of the sub-sector. These challenges include:
incessant lecturers strike resulting in massive brain drain, lack of teaching
facilities in schools and poor funding.
– there are not enough vacancies to
match the large number of graduates
– graduates’ specialization do not
correspond with organizational needs in Nigeria
– the graduates are technically
incompetent/of low quality. The author further emphasised that the president
stressed the need for universities to focus attention to courses that could
make graduates, creators of jobs rather than joining the pool of unemployed
youths in the labour market, saying “We now need graduates who are
problem-solvers and job creators, and whose characters will be enviable and
unimpeachable at all times.” This study is basically concerned with the last
adduced reason.
It is said that employers complain
that these graduates are poorly prepared for work. They believe that academic
standard has fallen over the past decades and that their degrees are no longer
a guarantee of communication skills or technical competence. The essence of
this project therefore is to determine if these tertiary graduates are meeting
the expectations of their employers or not.
According to Andrew et.al (2000) a
large mismatch appears to exist between university output and labor market
demand.
Their findings showed that the
employment prospects of recent graduates have recently deteriorated. This is
due to the weak Nigerian economy, the policy environment and inadequate level
of skilled human resources, especially the quality of the tertiary trained
portion of the workforce. The claim is that employers are not satisfied with
the quality of graduates produced by the tertiary institutions and that they
always have to retrain them before they become useful to their companies. So
this project sets out to determine if the quality of tertiary graduates is as
low as claimed or high. This deteriorating quality perception is supported by
results from empirical research.
There is a reported a lower rating
on the “reputation” of first generation Nigerian university graduates. They
expressed a belief that the quality of university education has fallen. Studies
by several researchers show that those who graduated in the 1980s gave more
favorable ratings to questions regarding availability of study resources than
those who graduated in the 1990s. This goes to show that study materials are
lacking for the recent generation of graduates.
Many scholars have found that
graduates of Nigerian universities rated supervised practical work and quality
of academic advice received as very poor.
A casual interview of graduates in
engineering, management and the sciences show that only few find most of the
theories they learn in schools applicable in their daily work. In particular,
graduates rated the practical aspects of their education very poorly. If this
is so, it means the school syllabus is obsolete.
The present Nigeria graduate is a
direct product of our society, a reflection of the decay and a mirror image of
the loss of morals and values. These findings illustrate the wide gap that
exists between what is taught in the universities and what the world of work
requires. Stakeholders believe that it is the responsibility of our educational
system to provide graduates with the background and skills necessary to be
successful in their chosen fields of endeavor.
For this reason, when employers recruit
graduates, they look for graduates from institutions with curricula that use
new technology and emphasize current practices. One of the means to this end is
a serious academic research orientation among the academic staffs in Nigerian
institutions of higher learning. It is also a known fact that Nigerian public
institutions have high enrolments without enough qualified instructors.
Although most employers are unhappy
with the quality of graduates Nigerian tertiary institutions have turned out in
recent times. They are well aware of the causes. Many employers are quick to
state that the quality of these graduates is simply a reflection of the quality
of academic staff, learning resources (libraries, laboratories, etc.) and
funding limitations. A solution to the problems of staff quality is critical to
any improvement in the quality of university graduates. The decline of staff
quality is reflected in high rates of “brain drain,” the declining numbers of
professors and assistant professors within the university system and their
falling levels of post-graduate preparation. Andrew, et al. (2000) views the
financial stability of the universities as tied to the fiscal fortunes of the
state.
In the last two decades the federal
budget has not been stable. It is tied closely to oil revenues, which have been
unstable. The consequences of unstable funding are reflected in poorly-equipped
laboratories, out-dated libraries, poorly- remunerated staff, crumbling
academic facilities, and low research output. And these are the things that
will build the quality of the graduates, positively or negatively.
Statement of Problem
The quality of tertiary
institutions’ graduates has been called to question severally by politicians,
educational stakeholders and employers of labour (who also are the end users of
the graduates’ services). There are reports that federal government would soon
establish a special mechanism to rate each university in the country based on
the quality of their products, particularly in terms of the quality of their
graduates and outputs.
Experts in the educational
sub-sector have blamed the high dependence of the industrial sector on low
technical expertise and high rate of unemployment bedeviling the nation’s
economy on the inability of Nigeria’s polytechnics and other tertiary
institutions to produce the much-required technical manpower in the sub-sector
sector. The complaint is that graduates performances are of low quality due to
their low technical competence and therefore they don’t measure up with employer’s
expectations.
Many therefore see an urgent need
for institutions to be more active to their responsibilities in terms of
reaching out to industries that will meet their requirements so that graduates
from the nation’s universities and polytechnics will be efficiently utilized by
the industrial sector.
In the light of the fore going,
experts have advocated a total overhauling of Nigeria’s education system.
According to them, if success must be achieved in this regards, it must
undertake some major tasks like acquiring and adapting global knowledge and
creating knowledge locally. All these point to quality. Similarly, by investing
in human capital to boost capacity to absorb and use knowledge and by investing
in technologies to facilitate both acquisition and the absorption of knowledge.
There is need to find out what
factors make up this quality and either affirm or negate the complaint. Their
quality depends largely on the type of training given to them. If they are
poorly trained, they will be of low quality but if given adequate training,
they will be of high quality.
Research Questions
In order to effectively carry out
this research, the questions below were raised by the researcher:
What is the perception of the
quality of tertiary graduates by employers of labour in Warri, Delta State?
Is there any difference between
observed graduates skills and employers expectation in Warri, Delta State?
Is there any difference between the
observed graduates skills and employers expectation for male and female
graduates in Warri, Delta State?
Is there any difference in the
perception of employers of the quality of graduates trained in part-time and
full-time programmes in Warri, Delta State?
Is there any difference between
private and public employers’ observed and expected perception of the quality
of tertiary graduates by employers of labour in Warri, Delta State?
Hypotheses
Research questions I was answered
while the following hypotheses were raised to guide research questions II –V
study by the researcher:
There is no significant difference
between employers’ observed and expected frequency of opinion of graduates’
skills and in Warri, Delta State.
There is no significant difference
between the observed graduates skills and employers expectation for male and
female graduates in Warri, Delta State.
There is no significant difference
in the perception of employers of the quality of graduates trained in part-time
and full-time programmes in Warri, Delta State.
There is no significant difference
between private and public employers’ observed and expected perception of the
quality of tertiary graduates in Warri, Delta State.
Purpose of Study
The objective of this project is to
ascertain if tertiary graduates are performing well (of high quality) or really
poorly prepared for the field of work (of low quality) as claimed. This can
only be done through the employers of these graduates. There is need to see how
employers rate their attitudes, initiative, innovation, behavior and total
performance on the job. In ascertaining this, the focus will be on:
Determining the quality of graduates
and its effect on their performance
Determining if graduates’ quality
meet employers expectations.
Determining if tertiary trainings
corresponds with organizational needs and employers expectations.
Improving productivity and
development in the country.
Significance of the Study
The importance of this study cannot
be overemphasized, seeing that it has so much to do with the graduates who will
determine the rate of development of the country. Since Harbison (1973) said
they are the ones who constitute the ultimate basis for the wealth of the
nation.
This study is therefore concerned
with determining the quality of tertiary graduates. This can be determined by
the perceptions of their employers which will help to decide if the given
training is adequate or not. After all, it is the users of a product that can
tell whether it is good or not. So the employers of these graduates who are the
users, are in a better position to tell whether they are adequately trained or
not. If they are of low quality, we will be able to determine why this is so
from their responses and proffer ways of improving them.
The findings of this research will
help to determine how correct it is to say that tertiary graduates are either
of low or high quality. If low, findings will help to determine areas where
they are low and put the institutions at alert.
Whether the quality is high or low,
findings from the suggested ways of improvement from the employers will
definitely yield novel information that will help the tertiary institutions
determine ways of improving the academic/practical quality of the institutions.
Furthermore, findings here will help
to determine how to improve the on-coming graduates. This improvement will lead
to increase in the rate of employment and production, which will further lead
to the development of the country. It follows therefore that this study will be
of help to the under graduate students, graduated students, employers, tertiary
institutions and the country at large.
Assumptions
Some assumptions are believed to
answer the “whys” of graduates’ low employment rate and the slow development of
the country. They are:
That tertiary graduates are not
competent in their areas of specialization because they are poorly trained and
of low quality
That these employers are not
satisfied with the quality of graduates produced by the tertiary institutions
and that they always have to retrain them before they become useful to their
companies.
It is assumed that graduates’ skills
don’t meet employers’ expectations on the job.
That graduates are trained in areas
that are not relevant to organizational needs.
Scope and Delimitation of Study
The issue of unemployment of
tertiary graduates spans through the whole states in Nigeria. And reasons have
been based on their quality. This study centers on all tertiary graduates that
have been employed, to determine their quality. The Warri axis of the Delta
state region has been used for this study, to find out the perception of
employers concerning these tertiary graduates. The study is delimited to Udu
LGA, Warri South LGA and Uvwie LGA as these are the major areas of employment
in Warri. The study covers all fields of work that are employers of tertiary
graduates.
The use of Warri for this study is
to give an insight to employers’ rating of tertiary graduates in Nigeria. Their
perception will be used to determine whether the quality of these graduates is
high or low. And if it is low, determine how to improve on it.
Definition of Terms:
The following terms were used in the
study and were explained as used in the study to enhance understanding of the readers.
Quality: is the measuring of
graduates’ outputs against inputs to determine effectiveness and efficiency. It
also referred to the performance Level. It is also used in this study to mean
readiness for work.
High quality: refers to graduates
who are technically competent in their areas of specialization and are
performing well with high level of performance on the job.
Low quality: refers to graduates who
are incompetent and whose performance are below par on the job.
Tertiary graduates: refer to those
who have completed the normal years of training for their undertaken course in
polytechnics, universities and colleges of education respectively; and were
awarded certificates to that effect; including graduates of other forms of
education higher than the secondary.
Unemployment: refers to the absence
of jobs to those who are suitable and qualified for it.
Educational standards:
pre-determined minimum requirements for the operation of educational activities
as contained in educational policies and programmes.
Place of training: refers to the
location where the graduate acquired his/her training which could be in a rural
or urban area.
Mode of training: implies the
acquisition of training through a part-time or a full-time programme of any
tertiary institution.
Urban tertiary institutions:
tertiary schools located in places very proximate or within the state capitals
of the host states.
Rural tertiary institutions:
tertiary schools located in places other than the state capitals of the host
states.
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