Author/s:
Adetunji, Adeniyi Temitope*
Business Administration Department, Bowen University, Nigeria (Niyi.adetunji1@yahoo.com)
Abstract:
This paper is intended to study the effects of the deregulation policy on university education in Nigeria with a view to understanding how the policy has been introduced and applied. The introduction of the deregulation policy to Nigerian universities has been aimed at improving the system. Although the policy has been introduced successfully in other sectors such as telecommunications, it has damaged other institutions such as the university system, because it is difficult to treat the university system like other institutions where deregulation policies have worked perfectly. The difficulty of treating a university like any other institution in terms of it multifaceted units has widened the gap in replicating any borrowed policy whether or not it has worked in any other sector to the university. The extent to which this gap has widened and its effect on service quality in the Nigerian university context have not been studied and these gaps remain unfilled. This research intends to fill this vacuum by exploring past literature using a standard literature review to discuss relevant works in the area of deregulation. The findings reveal that the introduction of a policy of deregulation on university education in Nigeria was not carefully considered and was not fit for purpose. Instead, the policy was suggested to try and solve the financial problems the country was facing at the time. As the policy was not considered properly before it was adopted, some confusion and misconception arose as to how the service was expected to run during the process. Likewise, other beneficiaries (such as funding bodies, accreditation team, employers of graduates, parents and students) of university education’s involvement were not well spelled out in the process of implementing deregulation policy.
Keywords: deregulation; government policy; improvement; Nigeria; university
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrsm.2015.1319
*Corresponding Author