THE UNIVERSITIES WE NEED, AND THE UNIVERSITIES WE MERELY CREATE

K BOLANLE ATI-JOHN urges the country to move from establishing university as status to education as capability

There is much in the federal government’s emerging education reform agenda that deserves acknowledgement. The renewed emphasis on technical and vocational education, Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM), student financing, education data, innovation and quality assurance reflects an important recognition by the Tinubu administration: Nigeria’s education system cannot remain detached from the economic, technological and demographic realities reshaping the country.

Perhaps even more significant was government’s decision last year to halt the proliferation of new tertiary institutions. The reasons were sobering. Education Minister Tunji Alausa disclosed that 199 universities received fewer than 100 applications through JAMB in the preceding admission cycle, while 34 received none. In one federal university, he said, roughly 1,200 staff serve fewer than 800 students. Government was confronting an uncomfortable truth: multiplying institutions is not necessarily the same thing as expanding meaningful educational opportunity.

It is precisely because these reforms point in the right direction that the moment invites a deeper question: what should determine whether Nigeria needs another university?

That question has acquired fresh relevance following President Bola Tinubu’s approval, in July 2026, of the conversion of the Federal Polytechnic, Nasarawa, into the Federal University of Mining, Engineering and Technology. There is considerable strategic logic behind the decision. Nasarawa sits within an important mineral belt, and Nigeria urgently needs expertise in mining, mineral processing, metallurgy, manufacturing and engineering if we are serious about moving from extracting minerals to creating value from them. The Presidency explicitly connected the institution to industrialisation and the country’s solid-minerals potential.

The issue, therefore, is not whether Nigeria needs mining capability. It unquestionably does.

The more consequential question is whether creating or converting a university should automatically be the preferred instrument for producing every capability the country requires.

Nigeria now has more than 300 universities across federal, state and private ownership. Yet a country approaching a quarter of a billion people, with an overwhelmingly young population, cannot reasonably be told that it has too much higher education. Millions more Nigerians will require post-secondary opportunities in the decades ahead.

Here lies the paradox: Nigeria can simultaneously have too little tertiary capacity for its population and too many poorly differentiated institutions competing for limited professors, laboratories, research funding and students.

Our problem, then, is not fundamentally how many universities we have.

It is that we have gradually confused the multiplication of institutions with the accumulation of capability.

A University Is Not a Signboard

A university does not become a serious university merely because legislation establishes it and buildings carry its name. A university represents accumulated intellectual capital: professors, laboratories, libraries, doctoral programmes, research traditions, international networks, industry relationships and generations of scholarship.

Those things cannot be created by proclamation. They are accumulated painstakingly over decades.

More importantly, not every national skills requirement needs a university.

Consider mining. A modern mining industry certainly requires geologists, metallurgists, mining engineers and researchers. But it also requires drill technicians, surveyors, mineral-processing technologists, electricians, welders, heavy-equipment specialists, instrumentation technicians, plant operators and maintenance professionals.

Who will train them?

If every strategic skills shortage eventually produces another university, Nigeria risks developing an education system increasingly rich in degree-awarding institutions but poor in the technical depth required to industrialise.

And beneath that institutional problem lies something even harder to reform: perception.

For decades, we have constructed an educational status hierarchy in which the university degree sits at the summit, the polytechnic below it, and technical and vocational education somewhere further down. Parents absorb it. Students absorb it. Employers reinforce it. Government, sometimes inadvertently, validates it.

That hierarchy has consequences. When a polytechnic becomes successful, its apparent next step is often to become a university.

But why?

Perhaps a successful polytechnic does not need to become a university.

Perhaps it needs to become an exceptional polytechnic.

What Successful Countries Understand

Some of the world’s most technologically sophisticated economies have understood something we have yet fully to internalise: educational institutions do not need identical names, missions or pathways to possess equal national value.

Germany maintains conventional universities alongside universities of applied sciences and dual programmes that integrate academic learning with substantial company experience and vocational training.

Singapore connects universities, polytechnics, technical education and lifelong reskilling closely to manpower requirements and economic competitiveness. Education is not treated merely as a social service; it is part of the machinery through which the country builds economic capability.

South Korea’s education and training architecture evolved alongside its industrial transformation. As the economy moved through manufacturing, automobiles, electronics and semiconductors, the capabilities being developed through its institutions evolved with it.

China demonstrates another principle particularly relevant to a country of Nigeria’s scale: mass access need not mean diluted excellence. Through Project 211, Project 985 and today’s Double First-Class initiative, China combined enormous expansion of higher education with concentrated investment in selected universities and disciplines considered strategically important to national development.

Japan perhaps provides the clearest challenge to Nigerian perceptions. Its KOSEN colleges of technology were deliberately designed to produce practical and creative engineers through intensive technical education. They do not need to become conventional universities to command respect within Japan’s technological and industrial ecosystem.

These countries are not templates to be copied mechanically. Their histories, resources and circumstances differ substantially from ours.

But together they illuminate a principle:

Successful nations do not merely accumulate educational institutions. They design educational ecosystems around the capabilities they intend to possess.

Nigeria should do the same.

Change What We Value

This may be the most difficult reform of all because it requires changing not merely institutions but aspirations.

We must move from university as status to education as capability.

The prestige of an institution should not depend principally on whether the word “university” appears on its gate. It should depend on the quality of the knowledge, competence and people it produces.

Imagine a Nigerian institute of advanced manufacturing whose graduates are recruited before graduation by automobile, aerospace, energy and industrial companies because employers know they can design production systems, operate sophisticated machinery, programme industrial robots and solve real manufacturing problems.

Would parents still regard admission into such an institution as inferior to admission into a university whose graduates struggle to find a market for their qualifications?

Perceptions follow incentives. If technical institutions produce scarce capabilities, employers compete for their graduates and remuneration reflects their value, social prestige will eventually follow.

Government can accelerate that transformation by developing a genuinely differentiated tertiary architecture: research universities capable of competing internationally; comprehensive universities providing broad professional education; universities of applied sciences closely integrated with industry; strong polytechnics and institutes of technology; technical colleges and apprenticeships; and digital institutions supporting lifelong learning and reskilling.

Different missions. Different pathways. Equal dignity.

The objective should not be to make every institution a university.

It should be to make every institution excellent at what the nation requires it to do.

Before We Create Another University

The present seven-year moratorium offers government an unusual opportunity. Rather than becoming merely a pause between one period of institutional expansion and another, it could become a period of national educational redesign.

Before another publicly funded university is established, or another polytechnic converted, government should apply what might be called a National Strategic Necessity Test.

Five questions should be answered:

1. What specific national or regional capability deficit will the proposed institution address?

2. Can an existing university, polytechnic or specialist institution meet that requirement if properly strengthened?

3. Why must the solution be a university?

4. Where will the professors, laboratories and sustainable long-term funding come from?

5. Which industries, sectors or public institutions will absorb the skills, research and innovation it produces?

Where those questions cannot be answered convincingly, the presumption should be straightforward: expand, strengthen or specialise before creating.

This would help Nigeria strike a more intelligent balance between horizontal and vertical expansion.

Horizontal expansion creates additional institutions. Sometimes that will be necessary, particularly where demographic growth, geographic exclusion or genuine capability gaps justify it.

Vertical expansion does something different. It makes institutions we already possess deeper and better: stronger faculty, better laboratories, greater student capacity, better postgraduate programmes, research centres, industry partnerships and greater international competitiveness.

Nigeria’s demographics mean we will need both. But establishing another institution should no longer be the reflexive evidence that government is investing in education.

Sometimes the greater act of nation-building will be to take an institution that already exists and make it extraordinary.

What Can Nigeria Do Because Its Universities Exist?

Ultimately, this debate requires us to change what we count.

The important measure of educational progress is not simply how many universities Nigeria has established, how many campuses we commission or even how many degrees we award.

The harder questions are about capability.

Can our institutions help Nigeria process its minerals rather than merely export them? Can they raise agricultural productivity and strengthen food security? Can they design machines and manufacturing systems that Nigerian companies can commercialise? Can they develop technologies and intellectual property? Can they strengthen healthcare, secure cyberspace, advance artificial intelligence, improve energy systems and help Nigerian industry compete internationally?

These are not merely educational questions.

They are questions of productivity, industrialisation, competitiveness and, ultimately, national power.

A country of Nigeria’s size unquestionably needs more educational opportunity. But more education does not automatically mean more universities. Nigeria needs more knowledge, more skills, more scientists, more engineers, more technicians, more research, more innovation and, above all, more productive competence.

Sometimes achieving those things will require establishing a new university. Often, it will require making an institution we already have dramatically better.

President Tinubu’s education reforms have opened an important window for rethinking the system. The opportunity now is to take the reform logic further: from managing institutions to designing a national human-capital architecture around the Nigeria we intend to build.

The question for the next phase of education policy should therefore no longer be simply, “How many universities does Nigeria need?”

It should be:

“What must Nigeria be able to do, and what combination of institutions will give our people the capabilities to do it?”

Once we begin asking that question, the distinction between the universities we need and the universities we merely create becomes much clearer.

And so does the governing principle:

Capability first. Institution second. Politics last.

Rear Admiral Ati-John (Rtd) psc(+) fdc(+) is a Distinguished Fellow of the National Defence College, Abuja, and writes from Lagos