The Federal Government on Friday announced that it had stopped postgraduate training programmes for Nigerian lecturers and scholarship awards to students to study in “mushroom” and low-ranking universities abroad.
The decision takes effect from this year, 2017.
The government also condemned a situation in the past where lecturers were sent by their institutions to study in “mushroom and bottom-of-the-league universities abroad”, under the Academic Staff Training and Development intervention of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund programme.
The Executive Secretary of TETFUND, Dr Abdullahi Baffa, said this in Abuja when he received the leadership of Education Correspondents Association of Nigeria led by its chairman, Chuks Ukwuatu.
He said, “From 2017, we have stopped all that, public funds would only be spent to train scholars in top-of-the-league universities across the world.
“We are sending scholars to pursue higher degrees abroad but we are not putting the interest of the country in trying to know what these scholars are studying and where they are going.
“Our scholars who are supposed to be teaching and conducting research in tertiary instructions, who are supposed to be training and supporting the provision of high level manpower that would drive the nation’s economy should be trained in the best universities in the world.”
According to him, TETFUND has also stopped the beneficiary institutions from sending their scholars to attend mushroom conferences, warning that public funds would only be spent to support scholars in attending real academic conferences.