Is the West a level playing field for all?

There is a common narrative often peddled by Africans with a desire to migrate to the West (that is, both the cultural and the geographic West) that their desired destination is a level playing field for all people, such that everyone who lives there has an almost equal chance of success. But this narrative does […]

There is a common narrative often peddled by Africans with a desire to migrate to the West (that is, both the cultural and the geographic West) that their desired destination is a level playing field for all people, such that everyone who lives there has an almost equal chance of success. But this narrative does not seem to characterize the situation there. The West does not seem to be a level playing field for all people. On the contrary, Africa (that is, if performance from my country Nigeria is any indication), it seems, is even more representative of an equal opportunity society than the West.

The West is a highly stratified society, in the social mobility sense of it. For example, what university amongst universities a person attended will in many ways influence how the general society accepts them, in order to value or devalue them. At least in recent years, US presidents are almost always taken from graduates of certain select universities or colleges in the country. Amongst the institutions are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, College of William & Mary, US Military Academy at West Point, etc. Institutions like Harvard produced six presidents and four vice presidents, while Yale and College of William & Mary, put together have produced six presidents and four vice presidents. The social stratification in the West is so pronounced that a person who was not privileged to attend some of the institutions in the aforementioned category will find it difficult to become president, but even when they do, they may be well subjected to ridicule; for not measuring up to the mark.

US President Donald Trump comprehends this reality well to the extent that he reminds his decriers (who often claim he is not intelligent) that his college background is good evidence of his intellectuality like the presidents before him. But even though Trump did graduate from Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, which is an Ivy League institution, nonetheless, his decriers still look for reasons for derision. They say that he did not get an MBA from Wharton but a much less prestigious undergraduate degree from the institution, and that he was in fact a transfer student who studied at Wharton after two years of study at the less renowned Fordham University. In addition to the effort at devaluation, other Trump critics even say that his grades at Fordham were only “respectable” and that it could not have been the reason for his admission to Wharton. His admission to Wharton, they claim, was possible mainly because he had an interview with an admissions officer who was a high school classmate of his older sibling. Realizing the society in which he lives, perhaps Trump’s main incentive for transferring his studies to an Ivy League institution was a groundwork for the presidency, in a similar way that former US President Barack Obama also transferred his undergraduate studies from the less renowned Occidental College in California to Columbia University in New York.

The circumstances in the US is not much different from what you get in the UK and other culturally Western countries. Many amongst Prime Ministers of the UK were educated at select institutions as Eton College, Harrow School and Westminster School, which the Britons reserve as their elite brands. The University of Oxford prides itself as having graduated a significant number of UK Prime Ministers. Of the fifty-six Prime Ministers, forty-two studied at either Oxford or Cambridge (Oxbridge); eleven did not attend a university (amongst them are Winston Churchill and John Major), and the rest (Earl Russell, Neville Chamberlain and Gordon Brown) attended other universities, that is, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Edinburgh respectively. The stratifications in terms of social mobility may be one of the reasons the Westerners and their employers are overly obsessed by university and college rankings. Persons who attended institutions found in the uppermost part of the rankings table are almost mostly employed upon graduation while those from institutions found at the lower parts of the table struggle to find appropriate employment. But this is not the case in Africa (or at least in Nigeria) where the institution a person graduated from hardly limits their chance of becoming president or being employed by certain organizations. As a personal example, I attended a not-well-ranked UK university for my master’s degree. The degree program was energy-related, so, there were significant number of Nigerians in the class. But because the university does not have favorable ranking within the league of UK universities, a significant number of my classmates (who are either Westerners or live in the West) are unable to find appropriate jobs since we graduated in 2013. However, a significant number of others who live in Africa have found suitable jobs in the industry and/or the academia almost immediately after graduation. A certain classmate who is British, and who graduated with a distinction from the master’s program now works as an air traffic controller in one of the UK airports; a role that is in no way related to his trainings in geophysics and/or petroleum engineering.

But these manifestations are hardly a shock to me. In November 2012, I met a professional from the energy industry at a conference in London who admitted that the multinational company he worked for only interviewed and employed graduates from select UK universities. He told me that any graduate outside the universities he had mentioned would not stand a good chance of employment by their company. And because of my encounter with the industry professional, I did not argue with a friend who recently told me that he would not apply for a job in a foremost organization in the West when he came across the vacancy. My friend told me that his friend who worked with the same organization advised him to not waste his time applying for the vacant positions since he did not graduate from the select universities that their organization was interested in. In Nigeria, and to the best of my knowledge, graduates of all government-owned universities have equal chances of employment in the country. While a candidate may be discriminated against by one or two primordial variables that could arise from some temporal permissions, I am not aware that employers in Nigeria sift candidates based on institutions they attended. I am not aware that when a university vice chancellor is selected for instance, a candidate who attended a highly-ranked global institution would have better chances of getting the job over the candidate who received their training in Nigeria. I am also not sure that those who hold degrees from highly-ranked institutions of the world are more remunerated over those who graduated from less renowned institutions.

Thus, many times, Nigerians with the intent of travelling abroad to further their studies have asked of my opinion or advice on the choice of universities to attend. I am often asked pertinent questions by these Nigerians regarding the ranking of universities and if their career success will be enhanced or impaired by such rankings. To lend the advice, I inquire from them if they have the intentions of returning to Nigeria after their studies. When they tell me that they would return to Nigeria, I tell them to not bother about institution rankings as their successes here hardly depends on that. I tell them to attend universities that guarantees them an opportunity to acquire the skills they hope to hone so that they can put it to use in the development of Nigeria when they return to the country.