Students’ Perception of the Current State of Tertiary Education in Nigeria: Implication for Counselling.

Abstract

Assessing feedback from stakeholders or beneficiaries of a system is key in improving services rendered by the system. Students are at the receiving end of any educational system in the world, hence their perception on the current state of affairs should not be ignored. This paper presents an investigation of students’ perception on the current state of tertiary education and the psychological impact of the current situation on them. The study adopted the survey research design. A total sample of 373 students from universities and polytechnics were selected through snowball sampling technique. One research question was answered and two hypotheses were tested in this study. An e-questionnaire developed by the researchers with a reliability coefficient of 0.72 was used to gather data from the respondents. The data was analyzed using simple percentages and t-tests. All hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The result of this study revealed that students have a negative perception of the current state of education which also reflects in its psychological impact on them. Also, there is a significant difference in the perception of the current state of tertiary education among students in universities and polytechnics. It was recommended that the government through the Ministry of Education should take urgent actions in improving the quality of teaching and learning like other countries in the world.