The state government has three polytechnics and it is proposing to add four more. Why? You see, in 2009, shortly after I took over, we had an education summit and one of the things that became obvious at that time was that whereas over 25,000 candidates applied to the polytechnics, they couldn’t admit more than 9,000 at a particular time. And the question is: where would these people go to? In the university last year, over 45,000 Deltan candidates made DELSU first choice and then if you added second choice, it went up to about 90,000. Every year, we can’t admit more than 3,500. What do you do with the rest? One of the ways is to increase the carrying capacity, which is what we are trying to do and we have achieved to some extent in the university. The other day, the Minister of Education gave statistics showing that 1.3 million candidates wrote the UTME and they were not going to admit more than 300,000. The question is: what happens to the other candidates? So, there is a need for more campuses, for more institutions. As I have always said, we must provide an avenue for the teeming youth population that we have to go to school, go higher, let their minds be broadened and it is better to have an army of educated youths who are not employed than to have army of uneducated youths that are not employed. The idea is this: when you train somebody through tertiary education, that person is able to open up the mind and perhaps do other things. You can empower yourself. We believe that there are too many of our young men and women that are idle. So we believe that we want to create space for them. And building these schools would create employment opportunities for our young men and women. Those are the main arguments and then you begin to talk about the tangential ones, the fact that when you create these schools, they would have a kind of multiplier effects on the economy of the place. Indeed, the political, social geography of Ife is completely transformed because of the presence of that university. Instead of the laid back area that Ife ought to be, it is cosmopolitan now. Any community where you have a huge population of the young and educated is completely transformed. Home owners automatically have tenants. So it has an effect on the economy of the place and the culture of that place changes. ... Prof. Hope Eghagha, Delta State commissioner for Higher Education.
Posted on: Sat, 24 May 2014 06:14:12 +0000
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