Does Tertiary Enrolment Cause Growth in Nigeria? A Vector Auto Regression Mechanism

The trend in tertiary enrolment indicates that even though it has nominally been increasing, in real terms, it is abysmally nose-diving. This is largely due, in part, to the declining trend of the budgetary allocation to education in Nigeria. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates the causal effects of tertiary enrolment on economic growth in Nigeria between 1980 and 2010. The study utilized the VAR approach and the VAR-Granger causality test to analyze the empirical model of the study. The findings of the empirical investigation suggest that there is a uni-directional causality between tertiary enrolment and economic growth in Nigeria. The causality runs from economic growth to tertiary enrolment in Nigeria. The paper therefore recommends that there is need for government to genuinely be committed to funding the educational sector if the aspiration to be among the twenty most developed economies by the year 2020 will not be a mirage.