Female Enrolment in Part – Time Programmes in College of Education, Agbor, Delta State: Implications for Women’s Acquisition of Higher Education

Abstract

Nigeria has been making concerted efforts by participating in regional and global interventions and campaigns aimed at achieving gender equality in education. An on-going international intervention is the African Women’s Decade (AWD) which gives regular report of the state of gender equality in participating nations. Review reports of AWD show that there is profound gender inequality in enrolment especially in higher (tertiary) education in disfavour of women in Nigeria. In the same vein, recent studies show the preponderance of females in some conventional part time mode of study in higher institutions, which is seen as a positive sign. To explore these issues, the College of Education, Agbor, is used as a case study. The study employed a descriptive survey design and drew upon available data from documents on enrolment for the five types of part time programmes run in the College; the sandwich (for Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE), the Weekend NCE, the Outreach programmes (NCE); the regular part-time for first degree in Education and the Weekend degree programme. The study specifically determined the status of female enrolment in the programmes from documents which are officially available from 2010/2011 to 2014/2015 academic session. Five research questions guided the study. Simple percentages and Chi-square statistics were used to analyse the data. Bar Charts were used to make the female-male enrolment status more vivid. The results showed that female enrolment surpassed male enrolment significantly in all the part-time NCE programmes (sandwich, weekend and outreach) considered in this study. With the exception of physics political science and geography education subjects the disparity in enrolment status observed in the regular part time degree programme was in favour of the females, for the remaining 13 subjects, considered in this study. The weekend degree programme attracted more females than males also. It is hoped that the observed gender gap in favour of women in the part-time programmes will sensitize all stakeholders, the higher institutions, and the government on the inherent potential of this mode of study for the achievement of gender equality in education. Recommendations are made on the ways this potential could be harnessed in Nigeria, to achieve gender equality in higher education (tertiary education), without compromising standards. The major recommendations include: Subsidizing the cost of studying in various categories of part-time programmes in higher education for women, subjecting the part-time programmes to accreditation along side the full-time ones so as to ensure quality, and increasing the accessibility of these programmes in terms of location for women in Nigeria.

Keywords: Female enrolment status, gender equality, part-time programs, equal education