This dissertation explores the ways in which structural adjustment programme (SAP) has influenced university education policies in Nigeria. In this regard, it synthesized the literature on the International Financial Institutions to show how educational planners, policy analysts, administrators and scholars have responded to the demands of a structural adjustment-induced environment, as it pertains to the universities in Nigeria.
The dissertation draws on the tenets of political economy of education to ask respondents whether there is a linkage between the university system, federal Nigerian government and the national economy. And above all, the dissertation sets out to find whether there is a link between structural adjustment and university reform in Nigeria.
The results of the study indicated that Nigerian policy makers and their foreign advisors couch educational issues in terms of efficiency and inefficiency; and in the process define "quality", "output", etc. in compelling terms of cost recovery and privatization. Furthermore, the study shows that the Nigerian universities have suffered from such policy prescriptions as those advised by the Bretton Woods Sisters, thus resulting in the collapse of: academic programmes, teaching and research facilities, hence leading to disregard for laid-down academic procedures and of student and staff welfare.
The study also shows that universities in Nigeria are caught up in the twin tension of promoting development on the one hand, and also consolidating Western cultural dependency on the other hand. This is because, in the process of producing educated manpower, creating new forms of stratification, accelerating westernization and modernization, the universities have become the major channels through which the Western world is molding and shaping the thinking, tastes and life styles of the Nigerian populace.
