Despite being the world’s most popular academic study destination for international students with one of the largest education system globally, with about 3,180 universities, the US remains a nations where premium is placed mostly on skills rather than paper qualifications. The country also parades five of the ten topmost Universities on earth.
While, not being against the acquisition of university degrees, Warren Buffet, the 93 years old foremost investor of all time along with other American CEOs submitted recently that a college degree no longer matters in recruiting right workers. Buffet made it clear in his annual shareholder letters and public statements that he never considers where a candidate has gone to school when selecting CEOs for his Berkshire Hathaway group of companies where stock value is in the neigbourhood of $629,000 per share.
The investor holds the view that raw business talent and character outweigh academic pedigree, regardless of whether someone attended a prestigious institution or chose to go through unconventional educational path.
He cited world’s giant entrepreneurs such late Pete Liegl, Bill Gates, Ben Rosner and Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) as prime examples of business moguls who have made great successes without college degrees. Given the recent approval of the establishment of nine new universities in Nigeria in addition to about 300 existing ones, this may sound like a bombshell in the ears of personnel hiring agents in Nigeria.
Whereas the United States of America have had close to one third of their presidents as people without college degrees, Nigeria has continued to search for leaders from among the academia only. However, the fault is not to be found among those who go after paper qualifications while searching for competent and skillful persons to fill job vacancies. Rather, the biggest challenge lies in the education system run by Nigeria. Without due consideration for very poor curriculum, poor teachers’ remuneration and poorly equipped labouratories prevalent in the country’s educational system, it is often erroneously believed that higher formal educational attainment translates to competence.
This is one of the reasons for imbalance in the formulation of policies towards the reward for labour in the country. The system permits an oil worker serving as a fresh glorified personnel clerk with a university degree to earn higher salary than a post primary school mathematics teacher having over 20 years of experience and NCE as academic qualification. The funniest aspect of the whole scenario is that there is hardly anybody in the country that does not know that many of the academic papers in circulation are actually obtained fraudulently.
For Nigeria to be counted among the comity of nations with appreciation for credible discharge of assigned duties, attention must be paid to other means of identifying competence in addition to educational attainments. No law should debar a trained police officer who got enlisted into the organization as a young fellow with the West African School Certificate (WASC) from living the same standard of life lived by one who joined with a first degree without adequate knowledge of weapon handling, report presentation, criminal investigation and personnel management.
Time has come for the nation’s education system to run without interruptions by industrial disputes and threats from terrorists. Civic education and other curricula activities such as sports, farming, introduction to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) deserve greater attention. The greatest advantage of this is that a citizen can call it quits at any stage from formal education momentarily when a feeling of dreamt adequate skill acquisition actualisation is realised.
It is not correct to brand men like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as school dropouts. People drop out of school mainly due to financial difficulties or inability to cope. But Gates and Zuckergerg left the Harvard University willingly in order to venture into wealth creation with talents in ICT.
According to Tech leaders like the former Google executive, Jad Tarifi, advanced degrees, once considered vital for career advancements may be losing value owing to the rapid changes in technology and AI, especially. He contends that success in tomorrow’s workforforce will come from unique perspectives, agency, emotional awareness and strong human bonds instead of credentials alone.
Even Zuckerberg who left Harvard University without completing his course, once openly questioned whether college prepares young people for today’s jobs, noting that many impactful contributors in technology have nontraditional backgrounds.
The long and short of the stories being told is that the competitive war against poverty is today being spearheaded by daring young lads in inforpreneaurships. About six out of the ten richest persons in the world are ICT experts from America.
It is in the light of this that the Delta state’s Delta-preneurship initiative currently supervised by Dr. Donald Peterson, the governor’s Special Adviser on Entrepreneurship Development becomes a compass capable of directing the youths to their economic fulfillment destinations. The technology-based scheme, according to Peterson is divided into two segments – Tech-preneuship and Agropreneuship with the target of enlisting 6,000 youths in 12 months.
Beyond the Delta state initiative driven by Peterson, the government should ensure that the technical colleges in the state embrace computer studies along with other technical subjects to stages where they can develop software, using programming languages such as BASIC and JAVA or their equivalents in today’s Information Technology. Nigeria must key into the present world driven by technology and inspiration to excel.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s Technical Colleges, Universities of Technology and those of other specialized courses like medicine and agriculture must not be allowed to veer out of their core mandate areas by offering courses that are available in conventional schools and universities.
Those who chose to be technical staff in public and private organisations with little formal education must not be consigned to abject poverty as a result of low incomes that often remain static in spite of their efficiency in such areas of engagement. When agricultural revolution took off in Europe, it was embraced by later-day independent nations. France and the United States were some of these countries. The whole world is now experiencing revolution in different forms of technology.
One of the easiest ways for Nigeria to embrace this new approach to societal development is by ensuring that schools in the country at all levels are adequately funded. UNICEF’s recommendation of 10 – 15 percent of nations’ annual budgets going into education sector must be respected and sustained. This is the only way schools can be equipped with tools that will deepen skills acquisition that will not need paper qualifications for validation while promoting attractive remunerations for qualified teachers.
America was in the forefront of nations establishing schools for better informed society. She has now become one of the countries where priority is shifting from paper qualifications to developed intuitive natural skills.
It is therefore imperative for a country like Nigeria to follow suit if she is to actualize her dream of being recognised as a developed nation.
