Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Nigerian Universities

This paper examines the impact of accreditation on quality assurance in Nigerian universities. Descriptive survey design was used for the study. A sample of 74 universities out of 124 universities in Nigeria presently (22 federal owned and 22 state owned, and 30 private universities} was drawn using proportionate stratified random sampling technique. Also, simple random sampling was used to select 20 respondents (including teaching and non-teaching staff, who are in charge of the data needed for the study) were selected from each university, which amounted to 1480 staff. The study developed and used two sets of questionnaire tagged “Accreditation Procedures and Minimum Academic Standard Questionnaire (APMASQ), and Quality Assurance Questionnaire (QAQ)” with correlation coefficient (r) of 0.73 and 0.69 respectively and complimented with secondary data from NUC records. Pearson product moment correlation coefficient (r) was employed to analyse the data. While the null hypotheses developed for the study were tested at .05 level of significance. The findings revealed that there is significant relationship between accreditation and resource input into Nigerian universities, quality of output, quality of process, and no significant relationship between accreditation and quality of academic content. It is therefore recommended among others that human capacities should be built in the area of quality assurance so as to ensuring quality in Nigerian universities. Also, accreditation exercises and conducts should be properly manipulated and supervised without playing politics so as to achieve education standards, quality and effectiveness for purpose of accomplishing goals of university education in Nigeria. Key words: Quality assurance, Quality, University education, Accreditation, Standards, Quality improvement