Abstract:

Increasingly, higher education especially in developing countries does not always guarantee the production of graduates with good employability rating. This has been attributed to disconnect between formal education curriculum and practice requirements. A very good strategy to correct the anomaly is exposure of students to practical experience especially through university-industry linkages. The “town and gown” initiative of Covenant University is the students-focused component of a wider university-industry partnership arrangement aimed at positioning the university as a leading provider of well-equipped graduates with excellent employability ratings. The initiative was conceived as an interactive session where students in each academic department engage practitioners in their various fields of endeavour thereby creating valuable flow of information and experience.

The town and gown initiative is almost two years in operation and it is appropriate that it be evaluated to make it more efficient. In this respect, this paper examines the mode of operation, challenges and improvement pathways for the town and gown programme from the perspective of the students. A cross-sectional survey of undergraduate and postgraduate students in the four colleges of the university was conducted using questionnaire as the instrument of data collection. The data was analysed using descriptive statistics.

It was found that while the students deeply understand and subscribe to the positive attributes of the programme, the major challenges were the frequency of the interactions and its effect on the scheduling of other core academic activities such as lectures, tutorials and seminars. Most importantly, the need for the programme to evolve into a robust industry experience for the students is yet to be fully achieved. Appropriate recommendations on how to make the progrmme more result oriented were made.

Keywords:

Covenant University, employability, higher education, practice, town and gown.