NUC: Why Nigeria produces poor PhD holders

Abubakar Rasheed, the executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), says the country produces poor doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.) holders because there is a lack of competent supervisors.

The Ph.D., which is largely research-based, is the highest academic degree awarded by the university.

According to PUNCH, Rasheed, who was represented by Suleiman Ramon-Yusuf, his deputy, at the inauguration of the doctoral academy of Nigeria and training workshop on Ph.D. research supervision, said some Ph.D. thesis churned out are of poor qualities with copyrights infringement.

“A litany of problems have been identified, ranging from poor quality of doctoral thesis occasioned by the fact that a lot of the Ph.D. thesis was sponsored by staff who themselves are underpaid. We wonder how somebody who is not well paid will use part of his salary while his wife watches him go and do Ph.D. research,” he said.

“That was found as one of the major problems. One big elephant in the room is the issue of supervisors. In Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, there is an assumption that has proven to be wrong because somebody is a professor does not mean that he can supervise very well. We have issues of people who may be described as meddlesome interlopers in fields they are not competent to supervise.

“So, when you find such supervisors, students are victims of interminable doctoral programmes. You spend one year searching for a topic because the professor is not grounded in the field and is not humble enough to say he does not understand the methodology because he doesn’t have time to read it before.

“So all of these problems lead to frustration and at the end, the product or quality of the school is not what it should be. And of course, if you put this against the backdrop of the critical role which doctoral research is expected to play in terms of innovation, creating new relevant knowledge by generating knowledge that is marketable for goods and services converted to goods and services, all of these have an effect in terms of establishing of nexus between doctoral training and national development as a whole.”

Rasheed said the step being taken by the “NUC is long in coming and it is very important because we hope that this will be the beginning of disaggregating the issues and challenges of post-doctoral education in Nigeria, doctoral supervision in terms of the timeliness, quality, and relevance of research projects.”