By Matthew Don
While the Nigerian university system is gasping for breadth due to lack of seriousness on the part of both government and the lecturers, other higher institutions outside our shores are busy ranking tops in terms of qualitative university education.
The poor showing of Nigerian universities tells on every facet of our society, and leaves the high and mighty who are solely responsible for the rot with the only option of sending their wards to the few good schools where stability and quality education are their signature tone.
While the Nigerian tertiary institutions were not included in the 2017 edition of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the Nigeria’s Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) on Monday, August 14 called their members out for an indefinite strike, a development that is set to worsen the already poor outing of the country’s higher institutions.
The list of the best 800 in the world failed to have many African representations, with Asia, Europe and North America maintaining dominance. Only South African universities were recognized.
South Africa had the highest number of institutions, eight, on the list recognized from Africa.
According to Biodun Ogunyemi, President of ASUU, they resolved to go on the strike because the federal government has failed to implement its 2009 agreement and 2013 memorandum of understanding (MoU).
Over the years, the lecturers have lamented the non-payment of salaries, non-payment of earned academic allowance (EAA), removal of universities staff schools from funding by government and non-implementation of provisions of the 2014 pension reform act with respect to retired professors and their salaries, among others.
The South African universities so recognized include; University of Witwatersrand, University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, University of Johannesburg and University of KwaZulu-Natal, North-West University, University of South Africa, and the University of Pretoria.
Harvard and Stanford remain as the top two universities in the world, according to the ARWU study.
The University of Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University are among the others that made the top 10 globally.
Others are University of Oxford, Columbia University, California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago.
ARWU ranks universities by several indicators of academic or research performance, which include alumni and staff winning Nobel prizes and fields medals.
Other indicators are highly cited researchers, papers published in Nature and Science, papers indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution.
Although more than 1300 universities are ranked by ARWU, only the best 500 are published.
But in the list of 2017, universities ranked between 501 and 800 were also published.
The ARWU study has been published yearly by ShanghaiRanking Consultancy since 2009.