The university without a mission: why so many private institutions fail to produce useful graduates

Across the continent, the number of private universities and higher education colleges has exploded over the past decade. On paper, this is good news: more institutions, more places, more access to higher education for a fast-growing African youth population. But behind these numbers lies a question that few institutions dare to ask themselves: what are we actually for?

Many of these institutions were built around a simple model — recruit as many students as possible, collect tuition fees, hand out a diploma at the end. The curriculum is often copied from a Western template, teaching infrastructure is minimal, and the link with the local labour market is close to non-existent. The result is predictable: plenty of graduates, but little employability.

This is not a volume problem, it is a mission problem. A university that cannot clearly answer the question 'what do our graduates become?' does not have a mission — it has a business model. And a business model without a mission always ends up optimising the wrong variable: enrolment numbers rather than the quality of outcomes.

Employers are not fooled. Everywhere we work with companies and firms across Africa, the same observation comes back: new graduates need twelve to eighteen months of retraining before they become genuinely operational. That hidden cost — carried by employers, not by the institutions that awarded the diplomas — is the clearest symptom of a crisis of academic relevance.

MORIM stands for a simple but demanding idea: an institution should be judged on one thing only — what its graduates become. That means designing curricula from the real needs of employers, treating employability as a core performance indicator, and accepting that the size of a graduating class matters far less than the value it creates once in the labour market.

Realigning an institution around its mission is not a communications exercise. It is a strategic decision that touches faculty recruitment, programme design, employer partnerships, and how success is defined and celebrated internally. The schools that make this choice will become genuine engines of economic development. The others will, for a while longer, keep producing diplomas — but less and less of a future.