Socio-economic Impact of Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria on Host Community

Abstract

The establishment of Tertiary institutions of recent has generated a lot of discords and political fracas among Communities on the specific location where it should be sited in Nigeria. This is for the reason that individuals appreciate the fact that location of such institutions in a community could boost rapid development of such areas socially, economically and productive co-existence. Osun state University is a multi-campus university in south-western state of Nigeria. She is hosted by six (6) Communities in the state in order to impact on the Socio-economic development of these Communities and the state at large. In view of this the major objective of this paper is to assess the impact of Tertiary institution on host community within the context of its social and economic changes on the community in which it is located. Both quantitative and qualitative research design was employed while data was collected using a set of questionnaire supplemented with secondary data source from various publications. Analysis of the data collected, was done with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20 and ANOVA for goodness of fit at 5% level of significance. The results revealed that the location of the university hassled to an increase in the standard of living of people within these Communities, bring the people closer to each other from various ethnic backgrounds and also brought about employment opportunity and harmonious coexistence to the people of the community. The findings further revealed a positive correlation and cooperative relationship between the institution and its Communities, due to cooperativeness of the indigenes, non-indigenes and both management and students of the institution. The study concluded that location of a Tertiary institution in an area is a stimulus to the area’s rapid growth, provided the activities of such Tertiary institution are well guided and monitored.