The use and abuse of education: A letter to Adamu Adamu (II)

Sir, did you know that 25,000 Saudis return to their country every year with degrees from some of the best universities in the world? I also didn’t know until my friend who has worked in the region told me. So I dug further. The numbers I found are amazing, showing that while we in this […]

Sir, did you know that 25,000 Saudis return to their country every year with degrees from some of the best universities in the world? I also didn’t know until my friend who has worked in the region told me. So I dug further. The numbers I found are amazing, showing that while we in this part of the world, hope, pray and wait for things to fall in place, even a country which gave birth to a prophet and hosts the Ka’aba does more than prayers. Saudi plans and executes its plans seriously. The only fear some have expressed now is of the glut of graduates who would be unemployed and underemployed. For example, a forecast shows that there would be a surplus of 100,000 Saudi university graduates by 2022. But even this fear is flawed for the reasons I’ve already shared in previous columns.
Some call this ‘over-education’ and evidence exists to suggest that even advanced nations such as the United Kingdom and United States struggle with unemployment and underemployment among university graduates. “This crisis of over-education is even worse in some developing countries such as China and South Korea,” said Nader Habibi, a professor of Middle East Economics at Brandeis University and founder of Overeducation International.  Again for arguments debunking this fear-mongering, read my column published in this newspaper: ‘The economics of human capital: what happens to Dangote when stripped of his wealth?’
Turning its institutions to knowledge producers instead of knowledge recipients has been the dream of Saudi Arabia for many decades. And this dream has begun to bear some fruits to the extent that the head of almost every project now is a Saudi national – because they have qualified individuals to manage projects in different fields.
In 2014, the number of Saudi nationals studying overseas reached 130,000. These Saudis studying in accredited universities in advanced countries are supported by a mind-melting $3.5 billion (N700,000 billion) from a fund called the King Abdullah Scholarship Programme (or KASP). Under the late King Abdullah, Saudi set a target for itself to become a knowledge economy and by 2012, education consumed 10 percent of the budget. It imports top academic experts, including Nobel winners, to enrich and fast-track its goals. The government has also increased spending on elite universities in the kingdom, focusing attention on research in engineering and science.
These activities and investments have led to a massive expansion in quality and quantity of the academic institutions. Universities increased from 15 in 2005 to 34 last year. Enrolment increased from 604,000 in 2005 to 1.5 million in 2014. Saudi universities have not reached the top 200 yet in the world rankings, but they’ve not fallen short of their aims by much. Many of Saudi universities rank among the top 10 in Arab countries.
What Saudi is doing is not exactly rocket surgery. Many countries have used more or less a similar template. In one of my columns last November (Mr. Governor, 100 master’s degrees for N40 million), I wrote: “During an interview in Malaysia, a former vice chancellor of the famous Putra University told me that in the 1970s and 1980s, Malaysia fashioned a deliberate policy to send its citizens abroad.  ‘At a point,’ he said, ‘Malaysia had the largest foreign student body in the US.’  That’s not all, many of them were also in Canada, New Zealand and Australia.  Now we can see the effect of that human capital investment: infrastructure that compares with the best in the world, an economy that keeps growing at over 5 percent for four decades, a tourism sector that attracts 20 million tourists to a nation of 28 million people and an expansive education system that draws students from Africa, Asia and even Europe.”
Mr. Minister, we lack human capital mainly because our universities lack capacity. It is the reason why Ireland is more productive than Nigeria, in spite of its huge population. To increase human capital, we must increase the capacity of our higher institutions. To do that, there are two shortcuts. One, implement what Malaysia did and Saudi is doing. Send a large number of Nigerians abroad, say 10,000 in four years (or more, depending on our needs). When they come back, it would improve our human capital and therefore our productivity. It would also expand our universities. Those who don’t come back would send money home as Somalis do. Therefore, we earn foreign income this way.
Of course, we need stakeholders’ input to determine the skilled and semi-skilled manpower we need. Thus, universities, labour unions, manufacturers, medical associations, etc. must be involved in the planning.  For example, to increase the number of doctors, why don’t we send to medical schools in the United States for three years students who have graduated from microbiology and related degrees?
Of course, many naysayers have said sending students to study abroad is using our money to develop other places. This is a well-intentioned concern, but not an intelligent one. If there is unanimity that our universities lack quality, isn’t it a good investment to train our people where there’s quality so that we can improve ours? Or are we smarter than those who have done it and succeeded? Or do we hope to pile low quality upon low-quality and hope that something good would come from it?  My primary four health education teacher taught us that you can’t clean dirt with dirt. Have you not seen our embarrassing academic outputs? Our universities ‘invent’ things that are already detailed in books for many years – things that secondary school students make elsewhere. Our universities also don’t have the capacity to accommodate all the JAMB-qualified candidates.
The second shortcut is to do what the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and China are doing. Invite universities with name recognition to set up campuses here.  For example, University of Nottingham ranks 75 in the world. Its Malaysia campus is several times cheaper than its UK campus even though they use the same curriculum and examinations. There are benefits in bringing them here.
If we employ the above strategies, the things that are unaffordable to us would become affordable. Our economy would expand, knowledge would be transferred to our people, we would have human capital and, I hope, a good standard of living.