Towards Enriching University Curricula for Vocational and Entrepreneurship Empowerment of Youths in Nigeria

Abstract

Despite Nigerian government efforts at integrating vocational and entrepreneurial curricula into higher institutions to ensure that youths are prepared for the world of work, the challenges of inertia particularly in the area of inabilities to create jobs for self-empowerment and sustenance are key factors to such entertained fear in the mind of the would-be Nigerian graduates. On the thrust of these observations, this study focused on the possible strategies of enriching university curricula for vocational and entrepreneurship empowerment of youths in Nigeria. The study adopted a descriptive survey design and five research questions were answered in the study. A total of 1000 final year undergraduate students purposively sampled from some Nigerian Universities participated in the study. University Curricula Enrichment Scale (UCES)with a reliability co-efficient of 0.77 was used for data collection. Descriptive statistics of frequency counts, percentage, mean and rank order were appropriately used for data analysis. The study found that university curricula are largely void of many local vocational trades with a below average of 40.1%. Also, entrepreneurship and vocational school-work/internship learning is grossly inadequate with a percentage rating of 22.2 among others. It is recommended that all concerned with university policy formulation and implementation should re-envision university curricula for enhanced empowerment of youths for economic gains.