Prison inmate set to enroll for PhD programme

Prison inmate set to enroll for PhD programme

A prison inmate will soon enroll for a PhD programme in the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), the institu­tion’s Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Abdalla Adamu has said.
Adamu disclosed this yes­terday in Abuja in his address at the opening ceremony of the 53rd Meeting and 30th Anniversary of the Commit­tee of Deans of Post-Graduate Schools in Nigerian Universi­ties.
According to Abdalla, pris­on inmates and juvenile who are willing and qualified are given free education as part of NOUN’s corporate social responsibility.
“We have 84 study centres including the prisons; NOUN is the only university that al­lows prison inmates totally free education because that is the opportunity they have to learn.
“Right now, we have some­body who has finished his Masters and he is about to embark on PhD and he is still behind bars. We have young people who for one reason or the other are caught up and locked up.
“NOUN is the largest uni­versity in the West African sub-region and one of the biggest in the world with over 200,000 students.’’
Adamu urged the commit­tee to fashion out a mecha­nism for improving the global ranking of Nigerian universi­ties.
The vice-chancellor regret­ted that Nigerian academ­ics hardly uploaded their research content; hence the poor online visibility of Nige­rian universities. Adamu said that unless a university estab­lished a strong online pres­ence, it would not be ranked.
He said that NOUN com­plied with the National Universities Commission (NUC)’s guidelines and had all its programme duly ac­credited and wondered why the institution’s products were denied post graduate admis­sion.
In his address, Dr Samiala Mande, Dean, School of Post-Graduate Studies, NOUN, said there was need for Ni­gerian universities to catch up with modern methods of teaching and research.
He listed some of the chal­lenges confronting post-graduate studies as dearth of research grants, quality of graduates, quality of instruc­tional content, limited avail­ability of PhD holders to re­cruit, among others.