Parents must be careful when choosing schools overseas
Felix Adedayo is the Chief Executive Officer of FAB Educational Consults, an international students’ recruitment agency. In this interview, he said parents must be careful when choosing overseas universities for their children and that more Nigerians pref
Recruiting overseas students involves many complexities compared to domestic recruitment. How do you persuade students to study abroad?
We are educational consultants and we are into international student placement in different countries including Europe, Canada and the US. We have been doing this in the last 10 years, so we already have a pool of clients who know what we do. We bring universities into the country to display what they have and counsel potential students.
My office in Abuja serves as an official representative for foreign institutions in Nigeria where we process admissions. And we do not only take care of their admission, we also take care of students’ arrival in school and accommodation. Here, we verify the documents before submitting to the schools; we have the final say on admissions. We verify O’ level certificates online.
The schools you represent are in other countries. How competent are they?
We know all the schools and we go there regularly. It is not internet based, it is physical admission. I know the facilities on ground and I know their credibility.
Most of the institutions are accredited by our ministry of education and it is very important that before you send your child to any university around the world, you check the credibility of that university both in Nigeria and abroad as well. We represent 15 schools in the UK, 20 in Canada, 10 in Australia and over 30 in the US. We have schools in Cyprus, Malaysia, Togo and many other countries.
What does it take to study abroad?
The most important thing is funding. I will say you have to get the agreed credentials. Nigerian students are intelligent and we have millions of students with good result but sending a child abroad will cost more. If you have to send your child to a good school, you have to spend more and it’s the same as going abroad. Going abroad to study is not cheap, especially now that the economy is in recession. It will require that you spend three times what you have been spending before. The price of dollar has almost doubled at the black market and forex is not easy to get.
We look at the academic requirement of schools, if your parents have the money and you don’t have good credentials to get admissions then it is useless. The first question is what is your budget?
Somebody wants to go to London and he says he has N1 million, he will go nowhere, and some even come to say they have N500,000. There are schools in Nigeria that charge N500,000 and above. You must have a million naira upward to study abroad.
There were stories that the quality of undergraduate education in some schools is poor. How true is that?
A typical Nigerian parent wants their child to go abroad and study at a cheap rate. Being cheap does not mean there is no quality in it. In Malaysia in those days, there were schools owned by private individuals for making money and if they discover that you are a foreign student who just wants a visa to go there, they will admit you and in the end, students don’t learn anything there because of lack of facilities, that is why you don’t expect them to come back here and compete with us. But the mentality that my child is studying abroad goes beyond that. They should know that it is not everything abroad that is good. The word ‘fake’ did not originate from Nigeria; it is an English word, meaning that other countries have substandard products and education. There are some Nigerian medical schools that are far better than some medical schools abroad. But you find Nigerian students going there because they are cheap and they will come back home failing many exams.
There are some medical schools in Sudan where you find over 500 medical students in a class. I feel sad for students who go to those places.
I won’t say more Nigerians are going there or not because those who realize that they are not good will never go there again, and most of them who made this mistake are trying to get out of those schools. Some students are begging their parents to take them away from some schools especially medical students. We have some schools in some countries that have a specific number of students they want and when they get what they want; no matter your grade they just have to shortlist you for the next year. Parents need to know where they are sending their children to.
Where do Nigerian student prefer to go to?
More Nigerian students prefer to study in Canada because of quality education and job opportunity. In Canada, if you study for 1 year you will get two-year job opportunity and if you study for 2 years you will get a 3-yearjob environment. That encourages students to stay back and work to earn some money.
What about Asian countries?
Asian countries are
Is it that Nigerian student mix up with people there to commit crimes?
We have two classes of Nigerian students there. We have the ones who go there to study and we also have those who go there to do illicit drug businesses or what they call ‘yahoo business.’ Some of them have friends who are into illicit businesses. We have millions of Nigerians studying abroad genuinely but we still have this few who are spoiling the image of the country and most of them being arrested for crime have the same students’ passport that a genuine student carries. When they arrest Nigerians, if they don’t have any previous criminal record, they let them go.
Is forex affecting Nigerian students abroad?
Just like I said earlier, what you used to buy for $150,000 to $200,000 is now $400,000 plus. We have parents who are withdrawing their children from schools abroad because of lack of foreign exchange. Now, if you have 3 children for whom you pay $10,000 each, and your income has not increased, you’d have to re-adjust. The prices of goods have gone high; a bag of rice which sold for N9,000 last year is now between N18,000 and N20,000.