Yet another look at our universities’ relevancy

For whatever reason, it seems like the past few weeks our universities have been sitting on my mind; It doesn’t help that our institutions of higher learning are making repeated appearances in social conversation around me. This is hardly surprising given the link between these institutions and economic development, especially in Rwanda. If we measured how much value university graduates add to the economy every year, what would that number look like? I recently landed on some work by Nico Cloete for the Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa. Part of his research included a comparative study of a few African universities in different countries and systems in more developed countries worldwide as a means to draw a link between economic and education policies and tertiary education development.The results are interesting. In OECD economies like Finland and South Korea knowledge is a driver for development with university education playing a critical role; In stark contrast, of the African Universities studied such as Makerere University, University of Dar es Salaam and University of Botswana, only Mauritius linked knowledge to economic growth because most African universities occupied themselves with resource-budgeting such as salaries, class space, rather than the most important issue, knowledge and its value-addition to development. Cloete’s work went on to measure how much university-generated knowledge impacts government-generated development strategies as well as how well-connected universities are to national development agendas. His work brought to the light the issue of policy instability resulting in a disconnection with development models and subsequently the agendas as a whole. I won’t be quick to say this is the case in Rwanda but I reckon it is (to a degree).A key issue on our job market vis-à-vis education is that of unemployment or even underemployment. Even with the heavy investment in education made by students or by the government, it is tragic when a civil engineer is working as a receptionist at one of Kigali’s leading banks – and not out of choice. It doesn’t help that our limited job market is being flooded by more experienced professionals from neighbouring countries, at the expense of local talent. I fully back our investment in STEM fields as a means to take our economy to a knowledge-based one but at times I wonder if we shouldn’t be focusing more of those resources on entrepreneurship and business management training and development so that we have people to build companies and manage universities or government institutions as a means to create a platform for these skills to be effectively put to use. This would tie a paradigm shift in our education system to our vision to becoming a knowledge-based economy without taking away any of the core elements really (if you are not aware of Rwanda’s roadmap to become a KBE, visit the Ministry of Finance page for Vision 2020). In addition to an active role in national development, if we do not have adequate resources to carry out extensive research relevant to our national problems, why don’t we tap into our Diaspora (and friends of Rwanda) to carry it out for us and publish the results in peer-reviewed journals for use by local academia? This also alludes to our syllabi/curricula that are not engineered to aggressively tackle local problems but appear to address more esoteric topics that for the most part are irrelevant in our context. What if instead of putting students in labs they were required to do practical work in their communities and publish papers that could be beneficial to policy-makers?I have written a number of pieces on education already and do not plan to play like a broken record but If you have time, take a look at Cloete’s work which also scores a number of academic core indicators such as STEM enrollments and graduation, staff with PhDs as well as research publications in peer-reviewed journals; you will be riveted by the realities of our system that it will open your eyes to.Have a wonderful week!