‘Cost of university education is too low’ – Oby Ezekwesili

Oby Ezekwesili, the former minister of education,  is of the opinion that the cost of tertiary education in Nigeria is so low that it has affected the quality of it.

While speaking at the launch of Edfin, Nigeria’s first educational microfinance bank, on Thursday, Oby said;

“There is a matter of how do you share the cost of getting a tertiary education. Unfortunately, our society did not come to the understanding that even education financing does not have to be a problem.

You must have a solution that the pricing of education does not get taken down to the level where it cannot sustain quality. That is what’s going on now. We are taking down tertiary education to a level where a person is comfortable to pay almost N500,000 for the children in a top secondary school but once the children go into the university, their parents are ready to join them to protest about the pricing of university education. In the process of doing that, you are compromising quality and relevance” she said.

She continued proffering a solution; “Those who have the capacity to pay should pay the right price for tertiary education and for those without the capacity to pay, edufinance and a subsidy from the federal government that is well designed will come to ensure that they are not left out of education.”

“Our country is in trouble because education is in crisis. A decade plus ago, I told the mission that if we did not address the crisis in education that in a matter of years. In fact, my prognosis at that time was that by 2020 that we will produce the most hardened criminals,”

“There are people who called me to say you said 2020, it happened earlier than that. As minister of education, I said the problem is not about funding. If you fund a dysfunction well, you will get a well-funded dysfunction” Ezekwesili said.

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