Good universities equal a good society (part 2)

You have pretty much answered the next question, which refers to your quote in the Punch newspaper some years ago where you said that 60% of Nigerian university students have no business being there. Do you still stand by this statement and what exactly did you mean by it?

es, I stand by that statement. I see that a lot of our students who are in the university would, given the choice, have preferred to be somewhere else. If their parents were not pushing them and if basic education was not free, especially at the public level, a lot of students wouldn’t be here.

And those who take degrees, spending taxpayers money in public universities to take degrees and then end up throwing the degrees away to do other things, they would have thought twice about wasting several years of their lives doing something that they don’t want or need. The degree would also become more respected as people have often complained that universities are producing poor graduates. Yes, they will continue to produce poor graduates, as long as everybody thinks that the fashionable thing is to go to university. Not because they want to learn, but because everybody else is there. So, those are some of the things we need to change. And of course, we have those who fully deserve a university education too.