Why this initiative started.

In 2014 or 15, when we were in SSS2, during an English language class, the teacher, Mr. Akinyoola, during a talk, made reference to how he would rather employ an English graduate than a linguistics graduate if he owned a school and needed an English language teacher. Said something along the lines of an English degree being more concentrated than a linguistics degree and hoped aloud that no one in the class was planning to study linguistics.

Everyone pointed to me and he went on and on about how I shouldn’t try it. For the next one year, I joined the other likes of Wale, Flourish, Biodun, Johnson, and Goke in opting to study law.

A series of events later — which I still believe has some undertones — I was lucky not to end up as a law student, rather studying one of the languages I love. Why did I want to study linguistics in the first place? Because I loved French, English, and Yoruba and wanted to study a course I believed was the melange of languages. As an undergraduate, I learnt that linguistics is the science of languages and not what I thought it to be or would have expected to learn as a linguistics student. In the end, both linguistics (my initial interest) and law (my redirected interest) would have been the wrong choice for me. That is that paragraph.

Similar to my story is that of my oldest brother. Unlike my case, he studied the course he thought — and was told — to be the intersection of mathematics and physics because he didn't want to pick one area of concentration, thereby abandoning his other love. Had he known, had he had access to something like what we’d be building, he would have settled for mathematics and found fulfillment in it.

In the past nine years, I’ve encountered stories of friends and people around me, stories of students who went to the university with little to no knowledge of what to expect in the course they opted to study. Or students who were not allowed to study what they wanted to study.

I’ve heard stories from: Kola, Phil, Abdulkabeer, Foyin, Muaz, Tawakalt, saw Twitter posts from Posi and some other medical students — and I’ve had two high-school graduates, one being my cousin, ask me for “what course to study”. Imagine being asked flippantly to help decide and shape people’s futures!

Nigeria is a country where people are slammed into career paths they know little about and are not prepared for.

There’s no one on the team who doesn’t have their own version of the problem we are trying to address. It’s crazy if you think about it!

And it all starts in secondary school.

The problem has different levels to it. Some end up in the wrong course, at the wrong institution. Some end up in the right course, but at the wrong institution. Some others end up in the wrong course, but at the right institution. You probably have your own story that resonates with this problem.

If I weren’t ready to do the due diligence and told each of them, perhaps in two, or three years, there’d be two people studying courses they’re highly disinterested in, cussing at the system and the person who advised them.

If I know 5 to 10 people who had this problem while transitioning from high school to the university, what’s to say half of the people in universities are studying what they currently study not based on deep-founded interest and research-informed decisions, but due to several limiting factors?

There is no strategic workforce development. There are hardly any pipelines to ensure the right career match for our people, talent, and human resources.

There is too much work being done by people to then re-invent themselves, where they spend years and resources trying to find what's right — something easily accessible and better information could have helped them with beforehand.

JAMB is continuing to make ridiculous policies about higher education admissions, and there are the different facets of the Olodo Uprising menace... we can also say what we want about these problems (and rightfully so). However, there is no country that will sniff anything close to redemption if it has a messed up education system.

This problem, like in my story, and my brother’s, and Tawakalt’s, and every other person’s, is the foundation for this solution.

Our plan is to conduct research to validate our going hypotheses and examine the different dimensions of this problem, then develop a working solution based on our research findings.

We are working on The High School Project, with this simple goal: increase the number of Nigerian university students who make an informed decision when choosing their course and school of study, by ensuring students at the secondary school level (or post-secondary gap year(s)) have access to comparative, multi-dimensional data and resources on getting a Bachelor's degree in Nigeria.

If you have a similar story to this; someone else like you, who is currently in secondary school or has recently graduated, is the reason why we are doing this. The young Nigerians who are off-track in their career trajectory due to a lack of proper workforce matching and development, they are the reason we are doing this.