Abstract:
Quality of Graduates (QG) is an important yardstick for their employability. However, the quality of graduates is on the decline, including those from federal universities in Nigeria. Previous studies concentrated more on assessment of curriculum quality and skills mismatch than on assessment of Institutional Factors- IF (autonomy, funding, academic freedom and curriculum implementation). This study, therefore, was carried out to assess IF and quality of graduates (speed of processing information, organisation skills, subject matter mastery, knowledge impartation skills, task execution accuracy, decision-making skills, emotional stability, interpersonal skills, multilingual ability, ICT skills, communication skills, time management skills, technical skills and reflective thinking skills) in selected federal universities in Southwestern Nigeria.
The study was premised on the Systems Theory, while the mixed methods approach (descriptive and phenomenological) was adopted. The multistage sampling procedure was used. Three states (Osun, Lagos and Oyo) were randomly selected from Southwestern Nigeria. The three first generation universities in Southwestern Nigeria: University of Ibadan - UI, ObafemiAwolowo University - OAU, and University of Lagos - UNILAG were purposively selected. Four faculties (Education, Arts, Social Sciences and Science) with large number of students and that are on four-year degree programmes were purposively selected. A total of 145 departments were sampled using proportionate stratified random sampling. The simple random sampling technique was used to select 1,273 lecturers across the departments. The instruments used were four sub-scales Institutional Factors Questionnaire (Funding: r = 0.77; Autonomy: r = 0.78; Academic Freedom: r = 0.75; Curriculum Implementation; r = 0.72) and Quality of Graduates Rating Scale (r = 0.91). Key informant interviews were conducted with six graduates and twelve lecturers. Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics and Analysis of variance at 0.05 level significance, while qualitative data were content-analysed.
The participants’ age was 45.60 2.40 years, and 71.2% were male. The QG was low (x ̅ = 1.42) and there were low funding (x ̅ = 1.68) and curriculum implementation (x ̅= 2.47) while there was high autonomy (x ̅ = 3.15) and academic freedom (x ̅ = 3.05) against the threshold of 2.50. There was a significant difference among the universities in curriculum implementation (F(2,1270) = 3.06). Curriculum implementation was highest in UI (x ̅ = 18.33) followed by UNILAG (x ̅ = 18.13) and OAU (x ̅ = 17.96), while there was no significant difference in other IFs. Graduates were rated low by captains of industries on speed of processing information (87.1%), subject matter mastery (69.1%), knowledge impartation skills (78.2%), decision making skills (53.3%), emotional stability (51.3%), ICT skills (64.7%), communication skills (56.6%), technical skills (58.9%), reflective thinking (54.4%) and team skills (51.3%). The graduates had difficulty in meeting deadlines and preferred individual task to teamwork. Absence of absolute autonomy, low curriculum implementation and inadequate funding were adjudged by the lecturers to be hindrances to quality of graduates.
Poor quality of graduates was attributed to absence of absolute university autonomy, low curriculum implementation and inadequate funding in federal universities in Southwestern Nigeria. These institutional factors should be addressed by university stakeholders to improve the quality of graduates.
