A lecturer in the Department of Educational Management, Faculty of Education, University of Ilorin, Prof. David Durosaro, has identified high cost of education and inadequate funding of educational institutions as factors militating against educational development in Nigeria.

Delivering the 103rd inaugural lecture at UNILORIN on Thursday, he stated that funding of education since inception had been found to be deficient and hardly sufficient to meet the basic needs of institutions. The inaugural lecture was titled, ‘Where the shoe pinches: the cost of education’.

According to Durosaro, government alone cannot cope with the burden of funding education in Nigeria owing to the economic depression. He said that there was therefore not only the need to explore other sources of funding of education but to encourage public-private partnership in education funding and de-schooling the society through the use of modern educational technology.

He said there were 122 universities in Nigeria with 780,001 students and 17,507 lecturers with an average teacher/student ratio of 1:28.

He added that the Nigerian universities were made up of 36 federal, 36 state-owned and 50 privately owned universities.

According to Durosaro, there are 56 monotechnics enrolling 20,853 students, and 71 polytechnics with 311,844 students and 9,875 lecturers. He added that there were 85 colleges of education enrolling 342,000 students with 12,200 lecturers.

 Certainly, for the Nigerian educational system to cope adequately with the arduous task of educating 89.3 per cent of the teeming population, it would require substantial financial, human and material resources.

 We now live in a knowledge-driven world where the power of the brain is superior to the power of the muscle. Countries with higher technical know-how are now rated as first world while those with lower capabilities are rated third world countries. What you know determines what you are capable of doing. What you can do determines what you earn.

 It is what you know more than others that keep you ahead of them. In any group of people, whoever can absorb, integrate and apply the greatest amount of essential information will eventually dominate all others in the group," he said.

To improve education in the country, especially tertiary education, Durosayo said there was the urgent need for government to bring down inflation rate. He stated that there were modern educational technological gadgets to facilitate both teaching and learning. He argued that if the value of the naira can appreciate and some of the gadgets made duty-free, the cost of education would reduce since the gadgets were imported at huge costs.

The Professor also said it was necessary for managers of the educational system to focus on ways of reducing wastages in the system, adding that there seemed to be so much human and material wastages in the Nigerian educational system.

He also said educational institutions needed to improve on their internal revenue generation since the economic downturn was causing some cutbacks in the budgets for education.

He also suggested that the federal and state governments should formulate a school transportation policy, as according to him, transport cost has been ranked highly among the factors influencing private cost of education in Nigeria.

He stated that education was an essential commodity for every person; hence the society must pay the cost.

He suggested that to reduce the burden of cost of education on Nigerians, education must be seen as investment, while there should be some efficient criteria and quantitative approaches to investment decision making.