Apprenticeship by another name? Media discourses and the vocational turn in Nigerian higher education

Recently, Nigeria witnessed the widely publicised case of Oludare, a university graduate who returned his certificate and demanded a refund, claiming the education he received was worthless. “The certificate we are collecting in Nigeria now is a scam… take your certificate, return my money,” he lamented in a viral video (Vanguardngr, 2022, p. 1). His protest captured a growing undercurrent of disillusionment with Nigeria's marketised HE system (Chukwu, 2021; Stephen et al., 2022), which increasingly treats degrees as transactional commodities expected to yield employment and income (Oludeyi, 2022). Besides, this contradicts the Nigeria HE mission to produce “self-reliant and useful members of society” (Federal Government of Nigeria, 2013, p. 26), revealing a widening gap between policy aspirations and lived realities.

This disillusionment reflects national frustrations and global shifts in HE towards vocationalisation, apprenticeships, and snugger alignment with labour market demands. Universities worldwide increasingly emphasise work-integrated learning, as seen in England's expansion of degree apprenticeships since 2015 (Lester and Bravenboer, 2020; Rowe et al., 2017). These developments advance a broader neoliberal agenda, where employability and measurable productivity are treated as core outcomes of educational success (Wheelahan et al., 2022).

Nigeria's recent Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) represents its attempt to participate in this global shift of HE to labour market demands. Building on the earlier Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards (BMASS) of 2004, the 2021 CCMAS grants universities autonomy to dedicate 30% of curricula to vocationally-oriented innovations (National Universities Commission [NUC], 2023a). While commendable for its technocratic optimism in aligning with international trends, the framework, one could argue that it lacks concrete strategies to address enduring inequalities, assuming instead that benefits will be evenly distributed across all students. Although Nigeria does not formally operate degree apprenticeships, the increasing emphasis on work-readiness and entrepreneurial skills, as found in this study, suggests a growing resemblance to apprenticeship-like models, although they are shaped by local postcolonial realities.

While England's model is lauded for integrating professional pathways into university education, Nigeria's CCMAS reflects a dual ambition: to internationalise while addressing persistent local economic challenges such as graduate unemployment. This shift is further accentuated by the NUC's articulation of CCMAS, which prioritises “graduate employability, entrepreneurial skills, and digital competence as key outcomes of university education”, an agenda aligned with preparing students for global competitiveness and 21st-century work environments (NUC, 2023b).

To explore how these tensions are negotiated in public debate, this study adopts media analysis as its primary lens. Media discourses possess a distinct capacity to shape public consciousness, crystallise understandings of educational reforms, and expose the ideological assumptions that inform both policy and practice (Fairclough, 2003; Mendes, 2011). This approach is especially pertinent in Nigeria, where media representations significantly influence perceptions of HE and guide policy priorities (Adeyemo, 2015).

Despite a substantial global literature on apprenticeships, vocationalisation, and their neoliberal implications (Fuller and Unwin, 2017; Rowe et al., 2017), African contexts, particularly Nigerian HE, remain underexplored through media discourse analysis. Consequently, this research addresses a regional gap and contributes to broader international debates by examining how Nigerian HE is discursively constructed in relation to global vocational and apprenticeship trends. It also investigates whose voices dominate these constructions, government, academics, or other stakeholders, and how these narratives define what HE is imagined to be.

In the subsequent sections, the paper outlines the theoretical frameworks that underpin the analysis. Specifically, it employs Bourdieu's capital and institutional habitus concepts as critical tools for understanding how media narratives on employability reflect and perpetuate social inequalities within neoliberal HE transformations.

Like other Sub-Saharan African countries, the evolution of higher education (HE) in Nigeria has moved in close connection with colonial and postcolonial imperatives (Solomon et al., 2020). Nigeria's first university, Yaba College (now the University of Ibadan), was established in 1948 to serve British colonial administrative interests, focusing heavily on liberal arts while sidelining vocational and technical fields (Muftahu, 2021). The Ashby Commission of 1960, a pivotal post–independence reform, attempted to realign HE with national developmental needs, advocating expanded access and investment in science, technology, and locally relevant research (Balogun et al., 2023; Solomon et al., 2020).

From the 1980s onward, Nigeria's HE sector became entangled with neoliberal reforms imposed through Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) by the IMF and World Bank. These reforms triggered sweeping reductions in public funding, stimulated a rise in private universities, and introduced increased tuition fees in public institutions (Saint et al., 2003; Obasi, 2007; Chukwu, 2021). Such shifts mirrored broader global transformations, framing HE as an economic tool focused on producing employable graduates and measurable economic returns (Lynch, 2006; Marginson, 2013). These changes marked a departure from civic or intellectual ideals toward a logic of utility, productivity, and competitiveness.

This market-oriented approach became more pronounced in the 21st century, especially with the introduction of the 2021 CCMAS, which allows universities to allocate 30% of their curricula to vocational and skills-based innovation (NUC, 2023a). Though Nigeria lacks a formalised apprenticeship infrastructure like the UK's degree apprenticeship model, the CCMAS rhetorically signals a similar shift by emphasising entrepreneurship, digital competence, and work-integrated learning, especially in science, technology, and business programmes. Alongside this, the Nigerian Student Loan Act of 2023, which ties education financing to future income, reinforces a view of education as an individual investment expected to generate financial returns.

Globally, countries such as the UK have developed structured apprenticeship models that blend academic learning with employment-based training, establishing clear professional pathways (Lester and Bravenboer, 2020; Rowe et al., 2017). In contrast, Nigeria's reforms rely more on rhetoric than systemic transformation, particularly in institutions with limited capacity to implement practical learning opportunities. The idea of apprenticeship by another name becomes apparent in policy and media framings that centre HE's value on its capacity to deliver job-ready skills, despite lacking the infrastructure to fully realise those ambitions. Scholars have cautioned that these approaches, while addressing youth unemployment, risk reducing education to narrow labour-market metrics at the expense of broader educational purposes (Wheelahan et al., 2022).

Furthermore, recent media commentaries and policy speeches highlight a growing focus on graduate employability, skills audits, and digital entrepreneurship modules as benchmarks of progress (Ademilokun et al., 2023; Oludeyi, 2022). Yet, these narratives often mask the uneven capacity to deliver such reforms. In underfunded or rural universities, these shifts remain largely aspirational, hindered by gaps in infrastructure, staffing, and digital access. This creates deeper concerns about equity, as educational reforms designed for national transformation may exacerbate existing disparities linked to region, class, and ethnicity (Mbembe, 2016).

Postcolonial scholars have long argued that neoliberal and internationalisation agendas in African HE tend to reproduce colonial dependency patterns. Nigeria's curriculum reforms and internationalisation policies, student mobility, cross-border collaborations, and accreditation alignment, often reflect external expectations of quality and relevance, overshadowing indigenous knowledge systems and local development needs (Tikly and Bond, 2018; Olaniyan, 2025). While internationalisation is frequently framed as a path to global competitiveness (Bandele, 2020), it also accelerates brain drain, as students view foreign qualifications as more valuable and seek opportunities abroad (Oleksiyenko et al., 2023).

Amid these overlapping pressures, the role of public discourse in shaping perceptions of HE becomes critical. Media framing, in particular, elevates the voices of government actors and academic experts while often marginalising students, families, and community stakeholders (Fairclough, 2003; Ademilokun et al., 2023). These constructions legitimatise a narrow vision of HE that prioritises economic productivity and self-reliance while downplaying its civic, ethical, and cultural dimensions. This review, therefore, sets the stage for analysing how vocationalisation, employability, and skills-oriented discourse gain traction in the public imagination and policy development, particularly through the powerful medium of news media.

This study adopts Bourdieu's (1986) theoretical concepts of capital and institutional habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) as a guiding lens for interpreting how HE is constructed within Nigerian media discourse. Bourdieu offers a powerful vocabulary for understanding how certain educational ideals, such as employability, vocational competence, and entrepreneurial readiness, come to be valued over others, not as neutral preferences but as expressions of deeper social and symbolic structures.

In exploring the dominant framings that position HE in Nigeria as either a pathway to employment or a vehicle for entrepreneurial self-reliance, Bourdieu's notion of capital is particularly instructive. Media narratives that prioritise skills aligned with the labour market, or that frame HE as a response to national productivity demands, illustrate how specific forms of capital, especially economic and cultural capital tied to global and neoliberal expectations, are privileged. These framings work to legitimise certain graduate attributes as more desirable, while implicitly rendering others, such as intellectual exploration or civic engagement, as less relevant.

Bourdieu's concept of institutional habitus also offers insight into how these values are embedded within broader institutional and policy logics. In the case of Nigeria's recent curriculum reform through the CCMAS, the emphasis on labour market, vocational and entrepreneurial training reflects not only a response to local unemployment challenges but also an adaptation to global discourses around competitiveness and skills-based learning. This shift, however, one could argue that it does not occur on neutral ground. Rather, it intersects with venerable hierarchies of value within Nigerian HE, many of which trace back to colonial frameworks.

Through this theoretical lens, the findings of the study are interpreted as more than policy or economic reactions, but as part of a broader symbolic reordering of what counts as legitimate HE. Besides, through the unpacking of whose voices dominate media discourses and which purposes of HE are amplified or silenced, Bourdieu's theory helps make visible the unequal distribution of symbolic power that shapes educational aspiration, access, and recognition in Nigeria today.

This study combined media analysis with a discourse-historical approach to explore how HE is constructed within Nigerian public discourse. Media analysis was chosen for its ability to uncover the socio-political undercurrents that shape public narratives and influence policy direction (Macnamara, 2005). Given the growing policy emphasis on vocationalisation, entrepreneurial skills, and curriculum reform, the analysis focused specifically on how the media represent HE in relation to employability, skills training, and apprenticeship-like pathways.

The study draws on the premise that media serve dual discursive functions: framing and gatekeeping (Mendes, 2011). Framing refers to the ways in which language, themes, and metaphors are deployed to construct meanings about HE, while gatekeeping reflects how particular actors and perspectives are selected, amplified, or silenced within the public domain. Together, these functions shape which understandings of HE become dominant, contested, or marginalised.

As shown in Table 1, three prominent Nigerian newspapers, Daily Post, Punch, and Daily Trust, were purposively selected for their wide readership, national coverage, and consistent focus on education and policy issues (Adeyemo, 2015).

Articles published between 2021 and 2022 were sampled, covering the post-COVID period and the release of the NUC's CCMAS. This period was marked by renewed public debates about the purpose of HE, making it especially relevant for this study. The sample included news stories, features, and opinion pieces. However, political campaign materials, advertisements, and public notices were excluded to preserve analytical focus.

Figure 1 presents the process through which education-related media articles were filtered to identify those specifically addressing the construction of HE in Nigerian public discourse. A total of 1,289 articles across Punch, Daily Post, and Daily Trust were initially identified for 2021 and 2022. These were then screened using inclusion criteria, focused on keywords such as apprenticeship, vocational training, entrepreneurship, employment, or direct reference to HE reforms like the CCMAS. The final dataset consisted of 331 articles that explicitly engaged with how HE is framed, valued, or imagined.

To assess the representativeness of this sample and the quotes used in the findings, each article was coded according to its dominant discursive construction of HE. Approximately 81% of the articles framed HE in economic or market-driven terms, emphasising employability, entrepreneurship, and vocational preparedness. Around 14% focused on performance management or institutional reform without explicitly engaging with educational purpose. Fewer than 5% of the articles framed HE as a public good or as a civic, cultural, or intellectual space. This quantitative distribution visibilised the study's core argument: that media discourses overwhelmingly construct HE through a narrow economic lens, marginalising alternative educational imaginaries.

A two-phase analytical process was undertaken. The first phase involved a descriptive quantitative scan to map the frequency and thematic emphasis of articles related to HE, vocational education, and curriculum reform. The objective was to identify how often HE appeared in national media coverage and to track the presence of keywords and concepts such as “entrepreneurship,” “apprenticeship,” “employment,” “vocational training,” “graduate skills,” or references to the CCMAS policy. This phase established the scope and contours of public engagement with HE issues (Zeh, 2005).

The second phase involved a qualitative thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke's (2022) framework. Codes were generated inductively and iteratively, identifying patterns in how HE was discursively framed. Attention was paid to both manifest and latent meanings. To complement the thematic analysis, this study applied the discourse-historical approach (DHA) as developed by Reisigl and Wodak (2009). Specifically, their discursive strategy was used. This was selected because it goes beyond surface-level language patterns to interrogate the ideological functions of discourse, particularly how social actors are positioned, policies are legitimised, and historical continuities are reproduced in public narratives. This approach is well-suited to studies like this, which examine education through media, a site where institutional discourses and power dynamics are both reflected and reinforced. DHA enabled the contextual interpretation of themes by drawing attention to nomination, predication, argumentation, and intensification and historical context strategies within the articles.

Throughout the process, reflexivity was maintained. As a Nigerian researcher familiar with both national and international HE systems, I was mindful of how my interpretive lens might influence analysis. An audit trail of methodological decisions, from data selection and reduction to code development, was maintained to ensure transparency and rigour.

In addition, this study used only secondary data from publicly accessible, open-access news articles published by three Nigerian media outlets (Punch, Daily Trust, and Daily Post) between 2021 and 2022. In line with institutional policies and procedures, and following the British Educational Research Association (BERA, 2024) ethical guidelines, the use of secondary, publicly available media data did not require formal ethical review or approval. No direct engagement with human participants was undertaken, and therefore, issues of consent, confidentiality, or harm were not applicable.

While media analysis offers a powerful means of understanding public narratives and discursive patterns, it is not without limitations. It does not fully capture grassroots or informal perspectives that exist outside mainstream media, nor does it account for newsroom-level decisions or editorial bias (Mendes, 2011). Nonetheless, this approach provides a credible and theoretically grounded way to understand how HE is imagined, contested, and redefined in Nigeria's shifting policy landscape.

Figure 2 presents the monthly volume of Daily Post articles referencing HE. It reflects narrative emphasis on policy reform, employability, and value construction during the CCMAS reform window.

Figure 3 presents the monthly volume of Punch articles referencing HE. It reflects narrative emphasis on policy reform, employability, and value construction during the CCMAS reform window.

Figure 4 presents the monthly volume of Daily Trust articles referencing HE. It reflects narrative emphasis on policy reform, employability, and value construction during the CCMAS reform window.

As illustrated in Figures 2–4, the three media charts show important fluctuations in how Nigerian news media represented HE during a critical reform period. A clear pattern emerges that media engagement with HE is both reactive and uneven, often aligning with moments of national educational significance or public concern.

Across all outlets, peaks in HE coverage appear in February, April, June, and August, suggesting heightened media interest during times typically associated with school resumption, policy announcements, or university strikes. Notably, February and August show marked increases in narrative construction, particularly around employability and vocational training, possibly in response to public dissatisfaction with graduate outcomes and ongoing unemployment debates.

Daily Post demonstrates the most consistent volume of HE reporting, with a significant spike in February 2022 and August 2021. These moments align with broader discourse around the value of education and the perceived mismatch between degrees and labour market needs. Interestingly, narrative construction related to value and reform is concentrated around these months, highlighting how media attention intensifies during periods of public scrutiny or governmental action, particularly the CCMAS rollout.

Punch Media, while maintaining strong coverage across both years, shows pronounced peaks in March, April, and September. The notable rise in narrative construction during April and September 2022 may correspond with implementation milestones of the CCMAS framework and public discourse around curriculum relevance and graduate readiness. Punch also shows an earlier and more sustained interest in value-based framings in 2021 than Daily Trust or Daily Post, perhaps reflecting a slightly different editorial stance or audience engagement strategy.

Daily Trust, by contrast, presents a lower overall frequency of education-related reporting but shows a steady pattern of engagement with value and reform themes across the year. While spikes in June and July are evident, suggesting mid-year policy or reform reactions, this outlet appears more moderate in tone, perhaps reflecting regional coverage dynamics or a more policy-focused approach to education reporting.

What emerges across the three media sources is a seasonal rhythm in education discourse, stronger during policy transition months, and muted in periods with less public or political tension. This cadence suggests that media construction of HE is not continuous, but closely tied to national mood, government pronouncements, and labour market anxieties. Importantly, references to value construction, employability, and vocational training appear disproportionately in mid-year months, reflecting growing alignment with international narratives around work-integrated learning, degree apprenticeships, and skills-based HE.

These trends support the argument that public discourse on HE in Nigeria is being reshaped around labour market expectations, with media playing a central role in translating policy documents like CCMAS into public conversations about worth, value, and reform.

The findings from the thematic analysis reveal two dominant frames in the public construction of HE within Nigerian media. First, HE is framed as a mechanism for producing future workers or employees. Second, it is increasingly represented as a space for vocational, apprenticeship, and entrepreneurial development. These media narratives closely align with the global policy shifts in HE, particularly in response to economic pressures, employability demands, and the influence of work-based learning models such as degree apprenticeships.

As illustrated in Table 2, the first frame portrays HE as an economic engine, essential for addressing youth unemployment and national development. Media excerpts frequently link curriculum relevance with employability, echoing the idea that universities must align their programmes with labour market expectations. This construction implicitly endorses the repositioning of HE from a site of broad intellectual development to one of instrumental value production, where graduates are measured by their capacity to integrate into a competitive and increasingly precarious workforce.

The second thematic frame signals a discernible discursive shift toward vocational and entrepreneurial orientations. Calls for integrating entrepreneurship into university curricula, and the emphasis on apprenticeship-like structures, suggest a transformation in the imagined purpose of Nigerian HE. Herein lies the core analytical question of this study: Is this vocational shift, increasingly legitimised in media narratives, a form of “apprenticeship by another name?” While terms such as entrepreneurial training or skills acquisition are more common in the discourse, the underlying logic mirrors global trends, especially the UK's degree apprenticeship model linking formal education to practical, employer-driven outcomes. Although Nigeria's CCMAS reform gestures toward such alignment, it also raises critical questions around curriculum autonomy, social equity, and whose interests vocationalisation ultimately serves.

Following the thematic analysis, this section deepens interpretation using the DHA developed by Reisigl and Wodak (2009) to unpack the broader discursive and socio-political dimensions of the media framings. While the thematic analysis identified dominant framings of HE in Nigerian media, DHA offers a deeper layer of interpretation. It traces how these framings gain legitimacy, which actors and assumptions they privilege, and how they are situated within Nigeria's socio-political and historical trajectory. In doing so, DHA makes visible the ideological undercurrents that thematic coding alone might overlook.

Nomination strategies concern how social actors are represented (Reisigl et al., 2009). Across the data, universities are metaphorically framed as “factories,” reflecting an instrumental view of HE as a site of production rather than inquiry or civic formation. This image positions the university within a narrow economic logic, privileging output metrics, graduates, skills, and workforce entrants. Students are typically nominated as “future workers” or “entrepreneurs,” invoking neoliberal identities that prioritise economic contribution over broader roles such as cultural agency or critical citizenship. By naming actors in this way, the media reinforces a vocational model of HE and legitimises reforms like the CCMAS as rational responses to unemployment and global competitiveness. DHA helps expose how these nominations are not descriptive but part of a wider ideological framing that narrows what HE is understood to be for, and whose futures it is imagined to serve.

Predication refers to the qualities and characteristics attributed to social actors (Reisigl et al., 2009). HE institutions are frequently described as “struggling with the quality of their graduates,” reinforcing a deficit narrative that positions them as inefficient and in need of urgent reform. These portrayals align with calls for curriculum overhaul and the insertion of practical, vocational content under the CCMAS. Meanwhile, students are constructed in narrow terms centred on employability, skills acquisition, and entrepreneurial potential, qualities that map neatly onto policy discourses of productivity and national development. Through DHA, it becomes clear that these predicates do more than describe, they function ideologically, casting HE actors in roles that justify specific reforms while marginalising broader intellectual, cultural, and civic dimensions of education. In doing so, the media reinforces a narrow logic of human capital that subtly displaces alternative educational values.

According to Reisigl et al. (2009), argumentation strategies concern how justifications are offered for particular representations. Across the media texts, reformist logic is primarily grounded in instrumentalist reasoning. Narratives about high unemployment, obsolete curricula, and graduate unpreparedness are frequently used to rationalise the need for vocational and entrepreneurial shifts in HE. The invocation of global comparisons, such as multinational firms like Google and Apple “no longer requiring degrees,” functions as a rhetorical device to signal Nigeria's educational lag and the urgency to modernise. DHA enables a clearer view of how these arguments construct vocationalisation not just as an option, but as an inevitable, globally endorsed response. These appeals close off alternative debates around education's social or civic purpose and present labour-market alignment as the only rational path forward.

Intensification strategies in the media amplify urgency, particularly around unemployment, graduate unfitness, and curriculum irrelevance. Phrases like “no business in the economy,” “ever-slimming chances,” and “certificate is a scam” heighten the stakes, framing HE as in crisis and necessitating immediate intervention. These rhetorical moves dramatise the need for reform, portraying vocational and entrepreneurial shifts as emergency responses. Mitigation, though rare, appears in references to ongoing reforms, such as the CCMAS, which are portrayed as steps in the right direction. DHA clarifies how these linguistic strategies structure public sentiment, oscillating between panic and reassurance, while narrowing the imagination of what HE could be.

The media framing of HE as a productivity engine is inseparable from Nigeria's colonial legacy, where universities were first established to supply bureaucrats and technical labour to the colonial administration. This utilitarian vision continues to echo in contemporary reforms like the CCMAS, which positions HE as a response mechanism to unemployment and skills shortages. DHA enables this reading by foregrounding how current reforms, while presented as progressive, often reinscribe older structures of educational control and economic ordering. Instead of transforming HE into a democratic space for critical citizenship and inclusion, the reforms risk retooling it as a narrow pipeline for labour.

The data in Table 3 reveal a striking concentration of discursive power in Nigerian public discourse on higher education. Academics account for over 60% of quoted voices, followed by government actors at nearly 24%, while students, parents, private sector representatives, and broader civil society actors remain markedly underrepresented. This imbalance reflects a broader pattern of knowledge hierarchisation where expert-driven perspectives dominate public interpretation of educational value, often at the expense of pluralistic, lived experiences.

While the expertise of academics and institutional leaders is not in question, their dominance in public discourse risks constructing a narrow and potentially exclusionary narrative of what higher education should be. Within this framework, calls for entrepreneurship, vocational skills, and labour-market readiness are often positioned as self-evident solutions to national challenges. Yet these constructions emerge not from inclusive, participatory engagements with all stakeholders, but from elite institutional logics that reflect broader neoliberal agendas.

The minimal presence of students, parents, and community voices, those who directly experience the outcomes of HE reform, suggests a democratic deficit in how vocationalisation and apprenticeship-like reforms are being debated and legitimised. These silenced voices are essential not only for deepening educational inclusivity but also for challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions that dominate contemporary HE discourses in Nigeria. In this sense, apprenticeship may indeed be arriving “by another name”, but without the participatory legitimacy that might otherwise give it democratic and social grounding.

This study examined how HE is constructed within Nigerian media discourse, with particular attention to the shifting narratives around employability, curriculum reform, and vocationalisation. The findings reveal that HE is primarily framed through an economic lens, positioned as both a solution to youth unemployment and a mechanism for generating labour-market-ready graduates. Drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of capital and institutional habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, 1986), these media framings signal a broader ideological reorientation of HE, one that prioritises capitals such as entrepreneurship, skills acquisition, and market relevance over critical thinking, civic responsibility, or inclusive educational values.

Media narratives frequently construct HE institutions as production sites or “factories” tasked with delivering outputs in the form of employable graduates. This metaphor echoes a neoliberal logic that sees education as a private investment in human capital (Gray, 2016; Raaper et al., 2015; Kaya et al., 2023) rather than a collective public good. The worth of a degree, in this framing, is defined by its proximity to labour market demands and its potential to secure income or job placement. As reflected in the data, policy reform discussions, particularly around the CCMAS, reinforce this utilitarian vision by emphasising entrepreneurship and technical skills (NUC, 2023). This aligns with global education trends, such as the rise of degree apprenticeships in England, where work-based learning is central to HE design and delivery (Lester and Bravenboer, 2020; Fuller and Unwin, 2017). While Nigeria does not operate a formal degree apprenticeship system akin to the UK model, the findings suggest that the language of work-readiness, skills acquisition, and entrepreneurial training increasingly mimics the logic of apprenticeship. This discursive alignment, though not structurally codified, effectively positions Nigerian HE within a global shift towards work-integrated learning. However, unlike formal apprenticeship frameworks, which involve employer–HEI partnerships and structured employment pathways, the Nigerian context remains rhetorically aspirational and uneven in implementation For example, according to Adekola (2013), it is non-university “learning/skill acquisition through enlistment with a master craftsman” (p. 399). Gerald et al. (2020) explains this further that “at the beginning of any apprenticeship, there is always an agreement. The agreement could be formal or informal agreement. That is, the apprentice or their parents or guardian may come to terms with the master or the representative about the duration and terms of the agreement.” (p. 98). This contrast shows how the apprenticeship discourse in Nigeria is less about structured professional training and more about a survivalist logic shaped by unemployment and precarity. Such framings set the stage for the prominence of entrepreneurialism as a dominant policy and media narrative.

Furthermore, the discourse of entrepreneurialism is especially prominent in Nigerian media representations of HE. Calls for embedding entrepreneurship and vocational content into curricula are presented as practical responses to unemployment and as normative solutions to perceived institutional deficiencies. Graduates are increasingly portrayed not as civic actors or scholars, but as future entrepreneurs who must possess demonstrable competencies to navigate the knowledge economy. This shift aligns with what scholars describe as academic capitalism (Jessop, 2018; Woldegiorgis, 2023), wherein universities adopt market-based identities and orient their missions toward profitability, competitiveness, and global mobility.

Internationalisation also plays a subtle yet important role in shaping how HE is constructed. Across media texts, references to global standards, multinational firms, and international success stories suggest that value in HE is increasingly judged against Euro-American benchmarks. While presented as aspirational, this alignment risks deepening postcolonial inequalities by undermining local epistemologies and reinforcing symbolic hierarchies in which Western institutions remain the gold standard (Mbembe, 2016). Obamba and Mwema (2009), as cited in Oleksiyenko et al. (2023), argue that internationalisation often involves asymmetric partnerships that reproduce inequality, a trend evident in how Nigerian universities frame themselves as globally competitive institutions.

The case of Emmanuel Chinweuba Nworie, a first-class mathematics graduate turned farmer, and the subsequent media framing of his postgraduate opportunity abroad as a redemptive outcome, accentuates this logic. His initial decision to remain in his local community was not celebrated; instead, it was interpreted as a failure of the system (Okereke, 2020). The media portrayal reflects a powerful normative assumption that only internationally recognised, high-income careers constitute “successful” graduate outcomes, reverberating the ILO and EU's problematic reliance on “decent jobs” as a benchmark for educational success (Burchell et al., 2014).

This dominant discourse privileges certain kinds of capital, particularly those aligned with vocational, STEM-oriented, and marketable skills, while marginalising others (Kewalramani and Kidman, 2023). Students with “STEM capital” or who conform to the entrepreneurial ideal are more likely to benefit from institutional support and public approval. Conversely, students interested in disciplines less visibly connected to economic growth may find themselves pushed to the margins (Lynch, 2006; Ingram et al., 2019). This is not just a symbolic marginalisation; it has material implications. Resource distribution, student opportunities, and public validation are increasingly reserved for programmes and individuals seen as contributing directly to national economic targets.

The institutional habitus of Nigerian universities is therefore being reshaped by the imperative to appear economically rational and globally competitive. As Atkinson (2011) argues, habitus is not solely determined by class, but also by institutional values and ideologies, including those driven by academic capitalism and market logic. Students already equipped with access to valued capitals are more likely to succeed in this system, while others, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds, may be systematically excluded or under-supported (Ingram et al., 2019; Jacob et al., 2018).

While the shift toward vocational and entrepreneurial education may be well-intentioned, particularly given Nigeria's high youth unemployment rate of 37% (Bailey, 2023) and the goals set out in the National Policy on Education (FRN, 2013), it risks entrenching educational inequalities. Not all students enter the university with equal access to social, cultural, or financial capital. For many, the call to “create jobs” or “become self-reliant” lacks the material grounding necessary to succeed. Moreover, the growing focus on employability may obscure the broader societal purposes of HE, such as fostering democratic citizenship, critical inquiry, and ethical responsibility (Lynch, 2006).

In addition to the content of media framings, the distribution of discursive authority warrants close attention. The overwhelming presence of academics and government officials in the sampled media suggests that HE is largely constructed through elite institutional lenses. While these actors may possess policy and sectoral expertise, their dominance risks narrowing the discourse around HE reforms to technical and economic terms, often sidelining students, parents, and other lived stakeholders. This concentration of voice, as Bourdieu would argue, reinforces symbolic power, positioning certain groups as legitimate definers of what HE should be. The relative silence of students, in particular, is troubling, as it points to a democratic deficit in conversations about educational futures. This exclusion one could argue, is not merely representational but structural; it limits the discursive space through which alternative visions, such as education as a public good, or as a space for civic and cultural development, might emerge.

While grounded in Nigeria, the findings of this study have resonance beyond national borders. The vocational and entrepreneur turn observed in Nigerian HE media mirrors broader shifts across other postcolonial systems grappling with neoliberal reform. In postcolonial Africa countries, for example, scholarship has documented how policy narratives increasingly link HE with economic transformation and graduate self-employability, skills training and entrepreneurship as solutions to youth unemployment (Bentum-Micah and Kyei-Nuamah, 2024; Ramnund-Mansingh and Reddy, 2021). These patterns suggest a regional convergence in how HE is framed, as a strategic tool for labour market integration, despite differing structural capacities. As such, this study contributes to wider debates on how the global imperative to internationalise and marketise education interacts with local postcolonial realities, often producing discourses that are both aspirational and exclusionary. The Nigerian case thus offers insights for other systems navigating similar tensions between global competitiveness, socio-economic precarity, and educational equity.

It invites urgent reflection on how educational reforms are framed, by whom, and to what ends. As global comparisons continue to shape national education agendas, it becomes increasingly important to ask: Whose HE is being constructed in these discourses, and who is being left behind in the process?

The analysis of media narratives reveals a shifting landscape in how HE is constructed in Nigeria. Dominant framings position HE as a mechanism for producing future workers, advancing vocational or apprenticeship-oriented education, and reinforcing a commodified view of learning. While these constructions mirror global trends, they also have far-reaching implications for how students, educators, and society engage with and imagine the role of HE. They signal a narrowing of educational purpose to economic productivity, often at the expense of broader civic, ethical, and intellectual development.

These discourses, largely shaped by academic and government voices, highlight a critical absence of other stakeholders, particularly students, parents, and non-academic professionals. This absence not only restricts the plurality of perspectives in HE policymaking but also risks creating policies that insufficiently address the diverse needs of learners or respond meaningfully to the complexities of the job market. The imbalance of voices points to a concerning democratic deficit in how HE is publicly discussed and institutionally shaped.

It is important to clarify that the findings of this study do not claim to reveal definitive or intentional strategies by media actors or hegemonic institutions to maintain inequality. Rather, the concern lies in how these dominant narratives, when presented as natural, inevitable, or self-evident, can inadvertently entrench exclusions and mask structural injustices. As theorised in this study through the lens of Bourdieu's symbolic power and institutional habitus, media representations become powerful precisely because they frame certain visions of education as universally desirable or neutral.

Perhaps this disconnect explains the visceral response of individuals like Oludare, the graduate who returned his certificate and called Nigerian education “a scam.” His public outcry reflects not just personal frustration but a broader sense of disillusionment, a rupture between the promises made by the university system and the lived experiences of its graduates. His voice, though marginal in policy discourse, encapsulates a crucial truth: that HE in Nigeria is at a crossroads, where its public legitimacy, social contract, and purpose are being actively contested.

Future studies could extend this analysis by incorporating the perspectives of students and other non-institutional stakeholders, whose voices remain largely absent in public discourse. Comparative media analyses across African or postcolonial contexts may also yield insights into how vocationalism is being reimagined globally.

I owe sincere thanks to my supervisor, Professor Michael Donnelly, whose encouragement to attempt a media analysis for the first time, together with his patient guidance and willingness to let me take the lead in my learning and research, shaped this project at every stage. I am also grateful to my funders, the Economic and Social Research Council/South West Doctoral Training Partnership (ESRC/SWDTP), whose financial support made this research possible.