Inequalities in Higher Education in Nigeria: An Analysis of Public and Private Universities in Adamawa State

In Nigeria the goals of the Ministry of Education is access and quality at all levels of education in the country. This is to say that quality education must be provided to all Nigerian citizens at all levels irrespective of economic social cultural and political differences. For this reason the Federal Government declared free education for all its citizens at all levels of the educational system. Unfortunately however beyond this it has not done anything tangible to ensure these goals are achieved. For examples it has not been able to establish enough Public (government) schools to meet the demand of her huge population – Nigeria is about 180 millions. This led to the proliferations of private schools at all levels. What is more, it has also failed to fund the public schools to the level that high quality can achieved. These problems are much more pronounced at the higher education level, where you have poorly funded less organised tuition free public tertiary institutions running side by side with well-funded and better organised very expensive private tertiary schools. Consequently, in Nigeria the rich are getting better quality education while the children of the poor are left with less quality education in the public schools and therefore better prepared to compete in job market. Inequalities in Nigeria social order are then perpetuated. In this paper we shall bring out the dynamics much more clearly and in more details with reference to two universities in Adamawa state; one public (Modibbo Adama University of Technology) and the other private (American University of Nigeria).