It is heart warming to most employers of labour to have graduates with good degrees on their payrolls. It is now a common thing to see vacancies carry clauses like " a minimum of second class upper". Companies believe that this gives them a competitive advantage against their competitors which would translate into greater profit margin.
Whether this is true remains to be seen; because how well a company performs is a function of so many factors and not solely on its human capacity. The craze for good degrees has impacted negatively on students; as most of them have now made it a do-or-die affair. Some of the students cheat while some pay their way through the universities.
Placing so much emphasis on paper qualification has often times proved that it is not the best measure of intelligence. Human Resource experts have it on record that employees who are average academically often do better than those who were extremely good in school when it gets to the work place.
The issue of class of degree has always been a recurring decimal in the labour market and it determines what job someone gets. The award of degrees ranges from first class, second class upper, second class lower, to third class, and pass and with corresponding Cumulative GradePoint Average (CGPA) of 4.5, 3.5, 2.4,and 1.5 respectively.
Oil companies, Banks and Telecom companies are fat-paying industries and consequently experience large number of applicants whenever they announced vacancies. The only way to trim the number of applicants to size is to introduce a certain class of degree as minimum qualification.
Creation of jobs would downplay the class-of-degree barrier; if there are enough jobs for graduates, employers would be left with no choice than to lower the bar for job seekers. My advice for organisations is to employ another/additional selection methods like apptitude test and oral interview; this would put to test the genuiness of paper qualifications.
However, if bars are not raised by the employing public, it wont give the students impetus to do well in their studies. The status quo gingers students to concentrate on their studies and drives them to excel in their chosen profession.
In my next blog, we shall be celebrating excellence, a graduate of Electrical Engineering with first class honours. You cannot affaord to miss it, keep following.
Some universities in Northern Nigeria do not want to award first and second classs upper grades to their graduates and hence put them at disadvantage seeking employment especially in the academia and multinational corporations.
ReplyDeleteThe last convocation of university of lagos produced 114 first class honours!
Well said Doctor. This development is disturbing and I see no reason why a student merits first class and he is denied. It explains the resentment academicians have for one another, in local parlance known as as "bad belle".
ReplyDeleteMy opinion on this issue of class distinction is to make all courses non-classified like we have in Medicine, Pharmacy and other professional courses. Universities should stick to the CGPA of 2.4 as pass. Period.