University education should be a problem solver, not a ceremonial add-on

Written By Tobi Olayiwola | 25 May 2026

According to a study by the Faculty of Education, University of Delta, the quality of a company is directly related to the number of adequately skilled employees engaged in that business. Where is the lie? The same is true for a country, for Nigeria. The more problem solving hands Nigeria produces per profession, the better the country is for it.

I’ll use accounting as a case in point, since I’m a qualified accountant. “Accounting is a dignified profession” was the first on the list in my secondary school note on why people study accounting as a discipline. Is it possible that we weren’t steered towards solving an actual problem even from scratch?

Yes, maybe the third or fourth on the list may have been about preparing financial statements but that should have been number 1 in the first place. But then again, that was just secondary school, not necessarily an institute of higher learning like the university.

Okay, accounting is a dignified profession, so what? If it’s so great, why are the students in the department unprepared for it? Why is the role of the university delegated to the professional body? What’s so difficult about charting a curriculum to match the expectations of the actual profession? What, really, is the value in teaching bookkeeping in 2026? What’s the point of paying for an education that always has to be substituted, not complemented, with YouTube videos?

The way I think about my university education is that I “beat around the bush” for the first two years, revisiting topics from secondary school. Why? What’s the value in revising old topics when new topics can provide much better context to them? Then, all of a sudden, expectations became high in the third year. A student who hadn’t learned much about basic accounting standards suddenly had to grasp harder ones like IFRS 10 (Consolidated Financial Statements). These students didn’t have a clear understanding of separate financial statements, but by some miracle, they needed to know how to group them already.

Now, my anger used to be as a result of peer failure. It’s deeper now that we’re out of school. Now that big expectations are on our shoulders and we’re unable to deliver because the knowledge from school is so… unusable. It’s such a shame that individuals gain admission into a university with the expectation of formation but that falls completely short on a per individual basis and that adds up.

What we need is a need-based education system. Let us open our eyes to the glaring issues of Nigerian society, then curate systems that solve these problems directly. We need to stop acting like many of the things we learn in school matter in real life, let’s be for real. Find the issues, allocate resources based on the needs, that’s more efficient.

Managing University Education for Employability in Nigeria: The Way Forward, Faculty of Education, University of Delta

I have identified two major problems that contribute to this issue:

The first problem is that the sector seems to be working in a silo. It has some liking to a delusional person—education seems to run in a completely separate direction to the realities of the economy. Instead of making education fit into realities, it remains the same as if many matters from 1986, when my daddy graduated from the University of Ibadan, are still relevant 40 years after. The issue of outdated education is not peculiar to Africa, it is a widely discussed topic in Western countries too, but my argument is we cannot afford the extra issue. If the US is struggling with making the accounting syllabus more practical, that’s one issue within a relatively otherwise good looking system. Nigeria simply cannot afford the extra issue.

The second is that Nigeria still considers the education sector as another expenditure basket with cost outcomes only. Until the Nigerian administration understands that this is an investment with infinite benefits for the economy, we cannot move forward. The 2025 budget for education was 6.7% of the total budget, the UK’s spending on education in the same period was 9.2% of its total spending. Let those numbers sit. The countries that perceive the education sector as an investment will steal the talents of those who do not.

 In the education sector, countless bright minds have become visiting professors at not so prestigious institutions abroad; they would pick that over becoming even the Chancellor of the University of Lagos. Many lecturers that remain in the system are possibly also victims of the same bad system.

 Nigeria is a developing country. UNESCO has advised a 26% budget allocation to the education sector in developing countries. 6.7% of the Nigerian 2025 budget was allocated to the sector, down from 8.2% in 2024. Make it make sense. And it’s not only Nigeria, other developing countries are guilty too. Don’t we get it? The international groups aren’t crazy to suggest that level of funding. It is an investment, for goodness sake.

We know what the problem is. We even know what the solution looks like. The only question now is whether anyone with power is willing to act like education is actually worth it.