Attending University Abroad…

There is no way I could recommend to any Nigerian student to go study in the US, the UK or elsewhere if our economy and our schools have not been messed up the way they are now by present and past leaders of this country. No responsible person or government seemingly would encourage her people to go out if the schools in the country are in good shape. You don’t have Americans, the British, the Canadians and Egyptians attending school here in Nigeria. The way it is, one suspects that the mess may have been a deliberate thing since these present and past leaders have schools of their own and have facilities that can compare with any university anywhere in the world: IBB has a school in Minna called El-Amin; Atiku’s school is Abti-American University, Obasanjo has Bells University and the Igbinedions have Igbinedion University. The paradox of all of this is that none of the children and grandchildren of these bigwigs will ever attend any of these schools despite the facilities they have. They send their children and grandchildren abroad and then, why should we encourage our students to attend these schools?

Many advantages accrue if one attends school in America, the UK, and elsewhere in the industrialized world. We gather that a lot of the multinationals here queue up to recruit Nigerians direct from schools in the UK and America today because they are sure these potential graduates are qualified and may bring the cosmopolitan edge of the industrial world to bear on their businesses. They said it was like that in the days before our oil doom – before you graduated, you already had job offers, a car and a house waiting in the wings. But take the Chinese for instance. Instead of them to destroy their public schools via under-funding and teacher-strikes leading to unpredictable academic calendars and build private and personal universities, they embarked upon a massive programme of sending their students to school in America and to the UK and Canada. Take the statistics yearly of students who go from their respective countries to the US for university education mostly to study nothing but the sciences and the radar points in the direction of the Chinese. I guess it is because of this sustained investment in science-based education abroad that’s made China a force to be reckoned with in the global economy, what with her annual trade surpluses.

Our government officials have schools of their own their and are interested in just the development and promotion of their own schools at the expense of our public schools. Our government officials who have schools of their own are not interested in this kind of massive and sustained programme and so why not encourage those who want to go out on their own to do so? If you are interested as a private candidate to go out to get an education either in the UK or America, please do so. But there are certain things you must know about the schools in the UK and the US. One, you have to have enough money to be able to finance your education. My agency asks you that one question before I agree to engage you, minding the fact that the people who run these schools are certainly in the school business as service providers and must maximize profit. I want to see physical evidence of the money you have in the form of bank statements, probably presented by your parents. There are many students out here and there who think about a university education in the US more in terms of a scholarship but they have to know that these scholarships are very competitive and some are far between. If you really want to go to school via a scholarship, you must produce a good essay, score very well in the math and probably be proficient in one vocation or the other. That way, you put yourself in a position of reckoning for scholarship. Otherwise, you would need something in the range of $10,000.00 every year just for tuition and excluding your accommodation, feeding, books and miscellaneous expenses. With that amount of money here in Nigeria, you could pursue an undergraduate degree for four years conveniently.

The other one condition you have to meet as a prerequisite for study in the US or the UK or even Canada is that you must be qualified. Even though these foreign schools know about WAEC and NECO, they have little confidence in the sparkling results you produce when you fill that online form via UCAS and through the internet. They know that some of these glowing results were produced through the efforts of mercenaries and rent-a-brains. They also want to juxtapose your result with the standards that are prevalent in the industrialized world and in most cases they rate the ones from Nigeria just below average. There have been candidates who presented glowing school certificate results in the past both locally and internationally but could not defend these results in terms of an academic proclivity. But most of the time I blame the people who cannot defend their results with some hesitation and this is because in the last decade or so, there had always been one way or another that the foundation of quality education has been diminished and undermined by those who run the country. And that is why these schools abroad expect you to pass through a one-year foundation programme before you resume the degree courses – and rightly so to sift the wheat from the chaff. But there are some private schools here in Nigeria that specializes mostly in running foundation programmes preparatory for tertiary education mostly in the UK or the US. If you get in touch with me, there are a couple of good ones I could recommend.

Another thing you should know about universities in America is that it is possible to grade them into three categories from the kind of conditions they put in place. There are those that ask you for certain grades in both the SAT and TOEFL. Others ask you for certain grades in only one of the exams – the SAT or TOEFL. The third kind are not bothered at all about your SAT or TOEFL results. To these kinds of schools, Nigeria and other countries in this fold are rich and hardly know what to do with their money and they goad you right on to come over so they get some of your money. These schools, believe it or not are backwater schools that may not even compare to the lowest grade of universities in Nigeria. Despite the fact that they are American or British or Russian or Swedish schools, they may not have the requisite academic status quo in terms of facilities. The American schools that ask to see both your SAT and TOEFL results are those in the Ivy League and they may not grant you a scholarship even if you deserve one. They are good schools, in my estimation and I encourage you to try get into any of them if you could, even though you would need something close to $100,000.00 in four years for an undergraduate and about $120,000.00 for graduate programmes. The other American schools that ask to see either your SAT or TOEFL and your ability to pay your fees are standard American schools and they may offer you a scholarship if you qualify for one. But you should not work to get a scholarship but to do well in your SAT. That way, you may clinch a scholarship if your scores are very high. Schools in the UK usually have a standard admission agency, the UCAS, almost an equivalent of JAMB and a standard school fee requirement though there are some that have a rolling admission policy like most of the schools in the US.

In the light of prevailing circumstances in Nigeria, I do not have any reservations in recommending that you study abroad, that is, if you could afford it and are qualified. The point also must be made that, if you cannot afford it but are qualified, there is nothing wrong if you go to school here in Nigeria, though you would have to make do with incessant strikes by university lecturers who may not get paid their salaries for months and lack of quality environment for learning. A certain young man I met recently has the intellectual acumen to study in any school anywhere in the world but hadn’t the corresponding wherewithal to back up his hunger

for school abroad, not even the money to enroll for his SAT exam. It was such a sad thing to do but I broke his heart when I told him what I just said in the penultimate sentence of this paragraph. But that is just the way it is.