Leaves in the African wind.

This is a reminder that Africa is now modernizing just as fast as possible and all that means is huge numbers of african scholars arriving at our universities.  this item shows us how volitile it is, but that is only Nigeria today and certainly not Nigeria tomorrow.

We already went through all this starting in 1980 with China.  they sent literally 10,000 students.  those are the the chaps who built modern China.  Less observed has been the Indian movement.  point is, that the best seats are in the old established universities and this anchors the global onslaught of modernity.

recall once modernized, immigration dies off.  Our only remaining source of ill trained workers are the islamic world and some parts of south america and that will only last a generation.

The big challenge facing us will be mandatory  production of children by all our girls.

Leaves in the African wind.

Yinka Adegoke

Welcome to Semafor Africa Weekend, where we understand our actions might have unintended consequences. That came to mind on the news that some smaller universities in the United Kingdom are facing financial difficulties, even bankruptcy, in part because there’s been a sharp drop off in Nigerian students applying. One explanation for the wider drop off has been a tighter visa policy environment as the U.K. government tries to stem immigration. But the other reason specific to Nigeria is that it is currently going through an economic crisis with runaway inflation and a spiraling currency.

Here’s the thing, many British universities rely on fees paid by foreign students — which are several times higher than domestic fees — to remain economically viable. In a report by the U.K.’s Times newspaper, the problem of the naira collapsing against the pound was cited by one university as the reason for its need to make cuts to staff and other costs after a “very sudden reduction of the number of students” from Nigeria. You can see why they had become comfortable with large Nigerian student numbers. The report says there had been a “sevenfold increase in enrollments in four years.” This saw Nigeria overtake the entire European Union with 33,000 students at British universities.

These British colleges, like their counterparts in other wealthy Western countries, lack imagination, argues Lydiah Bosire, founder of 8b.africa, a platform that facilitates education loans for African students who want to study abroad. “It’s time for these universities to innovate on the financing, put some skin in the game,” she told me. That would include working with capital markets to “provide fair education loans to the thousands of highly qualified African students who are priced out of their campuses.”

As I’ve noted here before, the world’s demographics are shifting towards Africa’s youth so colleges in wealthy countries will, as Bosire says, need to show some imagination if they want to maintain a sizable student body to match their scale.

The drop in the number of Nigerian students issued confirmation of acceptance letters required by international students for visa applications to the United Kingdom. Several smaller British universities are blaming this sharp decline in the number of Nigerian students applying to study in the U.K. as a key reason for potential financial problems for these institutions in the near future, according to a report by British newspaper, the Times. That decline is being squarely blamed on Nigeria’s economic downturn, combined with Britain’s increasingly restrictive visa policy environment.