Mercy has a mobility disability. She can walk for short distances but cannot use stairs or stand for prolonged periods. For her, coming to University is all about 'changing people's mindsets':
...you know. For example in our country ... there is a group which in reality has been forgotten and everyday I like to talk about the group of people who are physically challenged. It is a group which a lot of societies discriminate them. For example in my society where I come from, we still we see people like me as bad omen …these are people who have been forgotten even in many societies still they are being killed. For example our fellows who have skin challenges, albinos are being killed an issue which has recently brought a lot of fear in our society.
Mercy's ambition is to conduct social research that will illuminate such problems and communicate about them in a range of local languages. She fears this is not a money-making project but it represents her purpose in coming to university.
A fellow student, Salma, who is visually impaired, sees education as central to poverty alleviation. She says:
If you give me money without education I don't know which business to start because even those entrepreneurs they are given business education, training to do this and this but to a person who doesn't know anything, from nowhere and you give money that's why you find s/he will end up drinking and eating in two days so as to solve two days' problems.
Salma applies this logic to her need for an embossing machine that will translate text that she can read with her fingers. Why, she asks, does the University rely on readers (who may or may not be reliable and not available whenever she wants to read)? Surely it's far more sustainable for them to invest in the machine, so that texts, once transcribed, can be used by more than one visually-impaired student. It is as though having a visually-impaired student is considered to be a one-off event, unlikely to happen again.
Robert, a staff member, agrees with the students, above:
Poverty is not just a question of money, it is the poverty of thinking and higher education is supposed to really help people to think much more dynamically and much more… to enable them to think of possibilities of liberating themselves.
The experience of poverty also motivated some students to seek higher education, in order to transform their identities and 'become a somebody'. Eunice recalls:
I grew in a poor family… in a village where very few people who get opportunity to go to school, I am from there. Now as I had not anything in my mind thinking maybe I want to be someone, but I had just only desire to be at school…my aim was just to pass and pass and pass until I came to the university, when it is like my mind was now broaden, was open to discover that I should be focused to study there.
Muhamed, a new lecturer, goes further and feels that HE has to engage society in a debate about what higher education is for. Since only a small minority of people in the country speak English, that debate has got to break out of what he sees has a structural barrier of using English as the 'common' language. If HE truly wants to become more equitable, in can do so first, by including indigenous languages:
You might not be able to give people money for lunch, you might not be able to remove poverty in a day, but you can allow people to use their language without any cost… the University should really look into the politics or the kind of higher education that is going to have an impact on society. That is, an education which is going to achieve the Millennium Goals and set its own post-millennium goals. That has got to be looked into by the university itself. It has also got to be looking at its curriculum on a regular basis, but at the same time looking at various possibilities of opening up, getting many more people to register for higher education.
The public and private benefits of higher education were commented on by many students. For some, access to HE involved personal gain, for others, such as Naima, it involved social responsibility:
Before I can achieve self actualization in life, I should be a philanthropist who can work and help others and also get avenues to help solve poverty since I have gone through a lot of difficulties going to secondary school and coming to the university. I think poverty is a great killer and those people who may not be so much determined may fall out soon. I remember some of my colleagues who fell out because of these hardships so I think I am going to tackle poverty even as I self actualize. I will try and help people, establish businesses which I can employ people, going into agriculture sector and that's why I really want to work with world bank for some years and if I should be an employee, I am willing to work with World Bank for some years, get attached to people and expertise because they give out funds for agric development.
Magnus' aspirations were to help his extended family and to contribute to wealth creation in his country:
I want to be a good lawyer and I want to work in town, maybe If I can, yah, I want to do my own business immediately after I get experience from different companies and what not, so in precise I want to participate. I want to contribute something to my parents, I mean to my family, to my clan and to my country in general.
Francis on the other hand saw leaving his rural community as a marker of social mobility:
I think that university education makes life better [in terms of] social status … socially … will change. This is why when people asked me to do my teaching practice in the [my] region, I told them that, it is not advisable to go back and teach among the same people with whom you, you were before entering the university. Otherwise, you know the village people … they won't see the difference between you coming to do a course here and then going back to teach in the same school and in the same community. So I had to change the environment. You have to leave the environment. Others will say you have failed at the university. In fact a lot of speculations, so you only have to avoid them, that is all.
For Gabriel, a motivation to enter HE was the graduate premium and the independence and mobility that it offered:
In ... school where this old student come talking to us about the university life I mean how you can get the opportunity to go abroad and work … get whatever you want after you have worked and got your own money. Sometimes you do not depend on your parents. When you go abroad you earn your own money and then you come down and use the money for yourself. So I mean right from that day I started to think about university… so you can really get your independence and get your own money and move about.
Discussions questions
- What are the different purposes of higher education in society that are represented in the quotations above?
- What are the tensions and synergies between these agendas?
- What are the future policy implications of these multiple agendas?