The Vice Chancellor, Dominion University, Ibadan, Prof. Abel Olorunnisola, has faulted the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), for kicking against the inclusion of private universities in Tertiary Education Trust Fund’s (TETFund) financial intervention.
Olorunnnisola said it is wrong for ASUU or other stakeholders to believe that private universities were established primarily to make profit.
He lamented that most private institutions are not making profit, but are only rendering service and supporting the socio-economic development of the country.
Addressing journalists at the Lagos-Ibadan expressway campus of the institution ahead of its maiden convocation ceremony, Olorunnisola said on Friday, October 20, the institution will be graduating a total of 96 students, who have completed their academic training in the 11 academic programmes being run by the school.
According to him, ‘a total of 22 students, representing 22.9 per cent graduated in the first class division, 53 or 55.2 per cent in the second class upper division and 21 or 21.9 per cent in the second class lower division.
The overall best graduating student, Olaoluwani Israel Oseni graduated with a Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of 4.88/5.00 in Computer Science.
He said: “The TETFund came up as a result of a strike in 1992. The law that sets up the agency did not envision the barrage of private universities we have now. The fund is a tax from the private sector. All universities are producing manpower for the country.
‘’The private universities need to be included because they are also contributing to the socio-economic development of the country. It may not be on equal measure, but excluding them is not good at all. The thinking that private universities are set up to make money is not right, private universities are not for profit making. The goal is not to make money, but to provide the needed manpower for the country. For 20 years, some of them may not make anything,” Olorunnisola lamented.
The Chancellor, Bishop Victor Adelakun, said: ‘’Service must come first. By the time the graduates start working, in the next few years, we will begin to see what we have injected in them.”
