First Generation Nigerian Universities and their Lags in Transcript Production

First Generation Nigerian Universities and their Lags in Transcript Production

I have constantly heard testimonies from the alumni of some second and third generation schools in Nigeria about how their transcripts got delivered in less than 4 days—which is almost what transcript delivery should be like if our schools know what they are doing. Considering that the schools are aware that sooner or later, a student or an alumnus would need their transcript eventually, this should make the school take better care of the students’ results and also keep developing the processes involved in producing a transcript. It is shameful that most schools in Nigeria still produce such thing as a transcript depending on paper records, thereby making them need more resources—resources that are never available as needed.  For schools like OAU and UI that only started storing their results electronically and are still really struggling with producing transcript directly from these electronic databases, it makes it even more difficult realizing that these schools don’t have enough staff to make the production of transcripts easier, and half the staff they do have don’t like to do what they are employed to do.

If you are one of the lesser than 1% of alumni of these two schools who request for their transcripts and got it under two weeks without even involving any agent in the process, you would not understand what the ones who have to wait for months or even years are going through; some people’s case get so awful that even when they involve agents, their transcript would still not be delivered as when needed, and these can be blamed first on the lagging behind of the schools in ICT, then second on the government for not employing more human resources or monitoring the ones employed.  The fact that the last 3 years in Nigeria make the Transcripts Department of most schools (especially the first generation schools) better at revenue-generating, it should mean that more funds are returned to the department to keep the business growing to match up with its demands.

OAU and UI would receive at least the average of 100 transcript orders per day, this is a lot of gross profit considering the fact that these services are totally overcharged. In OAU for instance, an alumnus would pay approximately #10,500 to have their own transcript sent to their email. This would mean they should get good service worth the exploitative bill they have paid for such primary service. I used to think the reason why these schools have problems with producing transcripts fast is because they don’t have most of their results on an electronic database they can produce transcript from, but experiencing that people who graduated even in 2020 are going through the same hardship to get their transcript just as people who graduated in 2000 backwards are, this just invalidates the excuse that lack of database is the reason why transcripts are difficult to produce, databases are already well used in 2020. The primary problem is that these first generation schools move slowly towards getting digitalized, transcript production can get faster lest everything is totally digital.

People who read this also have interest in reading this:

Permanent Solutions to Transcript Issues in Nigerian Schools