BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND PRACTICE: THE "TOWN AND GOWN" INITIATIVE OF COVENANT UNIVERSITY, NIGERIA

Increasingly, higher education especially in some developing countries no longer guarantees the production of graduates with high employability ratings or that are well rounded to make useful contributions to the economy as profitable providers of employment. This has been attributed to disconnect between the higher education curriculum and practice requirements in various fields. A good strategy to correct the anomaly is exposure of students to practical experience especially through university-industry linkages. The "town and gown" initiative of Covenant University is the students-focused component of a wider university-industry partnership arrangement aimed at positioning the university as a leading provider of well-equipped graduates with excellent employability ratings the initiative was conceived as an interactive session where students in each academic department engage practitioners in their various fields of endeavour thereby creating valuable flow of information and experience. The town and gown initiative is almost two years in operation and it is appropriate that it be evaluated as a way of adding to existing literature on university-industry linkages. Hence, this paper examined the mode of operation, challenges and improvement pathways for the town and gown programme from the perspective of the students. A cross-sectional survey of undergraduate and postgraduate students in the four colleges of the university was conducted using questionnaire as the instrument of data collection. The data was analysed using descriptive statistics It was found that while the students deeply understood and subscribed to the positive attributes of the programme. However, the major challenges were the frequency of the interactions and its effect on the scheduling of other core academic activities such as lectures, tutorials and seminars. Most importantly, the need for the programme to evolve into a robust industry experience for the students is yet to be fully achieved. Appropriate recommendations on how to make the programme more result oriented both for the students and the industry were made.