Vision and mission in contemporary higher education systems: a case study of Nigeria

Higher education systems in Africa have been pivotal in terms of their roles in development. Each University established had its own mandate which was encapsulated in their vision and mission statement. Vision and mission are management tools for strategic planning. Most authors were of the opinion that universities today do have similar vision and mission statements and this is inadequate to identify the institutions strength and to delineate the institution`s stance with others. The vision and mission statement of universities has been a tool for strategic management in the public and private institutions and the study considered the vision and mission of the ranked universities and what in the vision and mission made them to be ranked. Based on data collected by Times higher education, which presented a ranking of all universities in Nigeria, four universities emerged as the best and they are Covenant University, University of Ibadan, University of Lagos, University of Nigeria Nsukka. Voyant tools were used for content analysis of the mission and vision statement to know what conferred more advantage on the ranked institutions. Voyant tools is a web-based text reading and analysis software that uses more than 20 visualization tools to analyze a text corpus. Also, indicators common to University ranking such as research excellence, internationalization and quality of graduates will be considered. This study therefore recommends that the vision and mission of these institutions should be overhauled to factor in existing realities in the country at large and efforts must be placed on knowing whether universities are delivering on the ideals of their vision and mission.