The Perceptions of Students and Faculty on the Potential Impact of University-Industry Collaborations on Quality Assurance in Two Nigerian-Publicly Supported Universities

The National Universities Commission (NUC) has observed that the quality and focus of training offered by Nigerian universities in recent times are not in tune with the needs of the country. Studies have also reiterated the above problems as well as their causes. These include decline in real value of government budgetary allocations for higher education; compromised university autonomy; deterioration of physical structures; incessant student and faculty strikes as well as the lack of modern teaching, learning and research resources. It has thus become necessary for Nigerian universities to consider the possibility of collaborating with industries for research and innovation as one of the feasible means of boosting their access to teaching, research and learning resources.;Findings show that university-industry collaborations in general hold good potential impact for quality assurance with regard to the facilitation of access to teaching and learning resources. With regard to higher education policy and practice, it is recommended that future studies be conducted with the aim of putting in place a modality for developing frameworks for a national scholar-practitioner policy on preparation, purpose and practice. Such a platform could encourage publicly-supported universities to partner with industry while at the same time meeting the challenges of carrying out collaborative action research and innovation activities aimed at arriving at a national agenda for human capital development and economic growth.;This non-experimental, quantitative research used a questionnaire survey to collect data from students and faculty of two publicly-supported Federal Universities in Nigeria with a view to examining the perceptions of the participants on the potential impact of university-industry collaborations on quality assurance in the universities. Collected data was analyzed using the SPSS Version 21 software to run appropriate statistical tests and to count, classify and explain the perceptions of all the participants with respect to each of the research questions.