Universities must educate graduates not just to succeed, but build

Nigeria is a country of extraordinary potential. With more than half of its population aged under 30, its greatest asset is its people. Each year 3.5m youth enter the labour market, new generations whose talent, creativity, and ambition will shape the country’s future. The question for universities is how we help unlock that potential.

Higher education must, of course, prepare individuals for employment. A degree should equip graduates with the technical knowledge, transferable skills, and interpersonal confidence to build rewarding careers. But our responsibility goes further.

The strongest global universities prepare students not only to graduate, but to apply their knowledge in ways that advance society: creating businesses and jobs, strengthening institutions, improving public services, and tackling challenges in their communities.

What can higher education do to help build economic growth?

Higher education is an engine of capability. Investment, infrastructure, and technology are essential to sustainable economic development, but their societal impact depends on the human expertise available to make the most of them.

Within 25 years from now the working age population in Nigeria is expected to expand by 100 million. The country's next phase of growth will not depend simply on educating more young people. The opportunity is to equip them with the advanced digital, engineering, entrepreneurial, and professional skills that are aligned to high growth areas in agriculture infrastructure, manufacturing and services, and green and digital industries.

As university educators, our challenge is to ensure that graduates develop more than specialist knowledge. Nigerian graduates are entering a world transformed by artificial intelligence, cleaner energy, and increasingly interconnected economies. Many will build careers in industries that are themselves being reinvented.

Universities cannot provide subject knowledge and consider their work complete. Graduates must be able to think critically, assess evidence, communicate persuasively, collaborate across disciplines and cultures, and apply knowledge to unfamiliar problems. Crucially, students need opportunities to put those abilities into practice beyond the seminar room.

All that means connecting higher education with employers, industry, government, communities, and entrepreneurs. Students should encounter real-world challenges, learn from those addressing them, and understand how their discipline can contribute to Nigeria's economic and social development.

We must also listen and learn. Global universities should not assume that an educational model developed elsewhere can simply be transplanted. Successful international higher education must be built through genuine, reciprocal, and equal partnership with Nigerian universities, employers, students, government and wider society.

What questions of Higher Education will help Nigeria to build economic growth?

Together, we need to ask: what expertise will Nigeria require over the coming decades? Where are the graduate skills gaps? Which sectors offer graduates the greatest opportunity? How can research and education help develop Nigerian solutions to Nigerian priorities?

This must also change how we think about international education. For many years, it has largely meant students travelling abroad to study. Whilst that experience remains enormously valuable, it should not be the only route to an international education.

World-class education should be accessible to talented Nigerian students in their own country. Transnational education and high-quality partnerships between Nigerian and non-Nigerian universities can combine global expertise with local knowledge. This model gives students an international academic experience while keeping them closely connected to the country, economy, and communities in which many will choose to build their careers.

Our partnerships must extend beyond delivering high-quality degrees. Education is most powerful when connected with research, innovation, and industry. Students can learn from research addressing challenges facing Nigeria, gain experience with organisations tackling them, and graduate equipped to help develop solutions.

This is how higher education creates a multiplier effect. One graduate builds a successful professional career. Another launches a company and employs others. Someone else improves a hospital, school, or public institution. Others develop their own research programmes that lead to new technology, policy, or economic opportunities.

Collectively, those graduates strengthen Nigeria's capacity, productivity, and prosperity.

At the University of Birmingham, we bring more than a century and a quarter of experience in research and education excellence. But experience does not mean possessing all the answers. Meaningful international partnerships require mutual learning and respect, combining our expertise with the knowledge, strengths, and ambitions of Nigerian partners.

Universities educate people whose careers may span four or five decades and conduct research with centuries of impact. That gives us a profound responsibility. The measure of an excellent degree should not simply be the certificate presented on graduation day, but what graduates are equipped to do afterwards.

Knowledgeable, innovative, and socially responsible graduates have an opportunity not just to participate in Nigeria's future, but to build it. With this goal in mind, higher education can become one of the country's most powerful investments.