Industry-Academic Partnership And Its Impacts On Specialized Education In Southwest Nigeria

The inseparable needs for close collaboration between institutions offering mechanical technology education and allied industries was the focus of the study. Occupationally, contents of courses offered in this field and similar other are supposed to be industry-derived and society needs-compliant. This has for some time, not been seen to be so, and has therefore, created some input-output deficits that have not only affected students’ performance and society benefits, but have significantly affected students’ enrolments into the programmes negatively. Two research questions and two research hypotheses were raised to guide this study. Survey design using structured research instruments were developed by the researchers on collaboration between academic institutions and industries. Population of this study will be 50 Lecturers in Mechanical and Automobile Technology drawn from Universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education in the Southwest, Nigeria, alongside 42 industry practicing experts in the same fields were involved in this study. Research questions were answered with Mean and Standard Deviation while t-test was used for the hypotheses. Based on the emanating outcomes of the analysis and discussions followed, it was recommended that functional channels of communication should be opened between academia and industry for meaningful interaction, make partnership an occupational policy and constantly share resources among others.