Cost and financing of university education in Nigeria

This study attempts to offer practical explanations on how to move recurrent resources from areas where there is overspending to where there is underfunding with respect to the costing parameters recommended for Nigerian Universities by the National Universities Commission (NUC). Supplementing available data from files and documents of universities as well as from the NUC with an interview with top officials from six of the ten sampled universities stratified according to age and geographical location, a regression model was used to relate the 1991/92 expenditures per student with eight explanatory variables; namely: enrolment size, junior/teacher ratio, goods costs per student, type of curriculum offered, grant-effectiveness ratio, and spending deviation.Using a descriptive statistics, it has been revealed that there were overspending on general administration, general academic and retirement benefits at the expense of research and public service. Furthermore, the study shows that non-NUC grants, gifts and external aid require further tapping to supplement the NUC which supplied over 80 percent of the total revenue. The regression equations predict that by increasing the enrolment size as well as the junior staff ratio; and by reducing non-academic/academic staff ratio; the student/teacher ratio, the goods cost per student, the curriculum cost and the spending deviation, it will be possible to increase the average expenditure on research and public service hitherto neglected and simultaneously reduce unit administrative supports costs.