Moses Christian mos_chris@yahoo.co.

uk NIGERIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM BREEDS POTENTIAL EMPLOYEES AND NOT ENTREPRENEURS There is no gainsaying that there are two types of student in any tertiary insti tution in the word: entrepreneurs (N-type) and employees (M-type). Students know that these two types exist but they do not know their own type. However, they a re wired consciously or unconsciously by the institutional milieu of their socie ty to belong or become one. Depending on the culture they live in, entrepreneurs may have stronger or weaker information about their type than employees. In a culture in which entrepreneur ship is not a predominant feature we might expect formal education to help stude nts discover and develop mainly those talents suited to being employees. In cont rast, a culture which accentuates entrepreneurship is less likely to provide str ong signals and training for talented employees and more signals for talented en trepreneurs. This is the case in most of the developed countries like the US where their educ ation policy wired the students with the mentality and the skills to create jobs . This underscores the reason for more vacancies than people can apply and thus people from African countries apply via Visa Lottery and the like. Conversely, this is the disparity between the system in developing countries and that of the developed ones. It is apparent that Nigerian educational system ten ds to support the M-type; our system spurs the students to go to school and afte rwards seek for jobs And as rightly noted by Festus M Kofe in The Role of Nigerian Tertiary Institutions in Graduate Recruitment , most Nigerian graduates leave school with the mindset of securing high paying jobs based on the fact that they are favored or connected t o the right people that will help them get employed in any high paying organizat ion of their choice. Sad enough, even the potential employees are not well equipped to face the chall enges of the workplace. Employers complain that graduates are poorly prepared fo r work. They believe that academic standards have fallen considerably over the p ast decade and that a university degree or a polytechnic diploma is no longer a guarantee of communication skills or technical competence. The tertiary institut ions that produced these graduates have not been able to meet up with the standa rd output useful in today's workplace; they have become centers for academic cer tificates acquisition rather than the training ground for skills and knowledge a cquisition. This mismatch appears to exist between university output and labor m arket demand. The employment prospects of young graduates have deteriorated- the y are usually not well prepared for the challenges after graduation especially i n securing good jobs and performing on the job, the basically due to economic si tuation in Nigeria, the poor education policy, strikes, disrupted academic cale ndar amongst others are in no small ways affecting the educational system in Ni geria. Therefore, there is need to revamp tertiary institutions in Nigeria and one of t he ways is by providing entrepreneurship education that encourages career-buildi ng that will improve the skill of student. Besides, tertiary institutions should include work and- school system of education (in their academic) to enable incomestudents to acquaint themselves with the experience and the demand of the labour market while schooling or /and internships that enable students for a skilled j ob by obtaining practical experience of the work in their filed of study. This w ay, more graduates will create job rather than seek for it and will be more rele vant to organizations. 300L, Department of English, OAU, Ile-Ife