Management Education in Nigeria: A Threshold Concept Approach to Teaching in Public Universities

Management education in Nigerian public universities is often approached by students as an instrumental means to economic mobility. While this is a rational response to persistent graduate unemployment, underemployment, and wider socio-economic precarity, it poses pedagogical challenges for management educators. This essay proposes that students are grappling with what we conceptualise as a meta threshold concept at the programme level; namely, that management education is an initiation into a professional and societal role . We argue that crossing this threshold requires students to integrate several interrelated concepts – capability, career, interdependence, and collective outcomes – which together reframe management education beyond individual advancement towards social contribution and continued learning. Drawing on our experiences as management educators in a Nigerian public university, we illustrate how educators can use threshold-crossing practices to coax students to grasp this troublesome yet transformative meta threshold concept. The essay offers deeper and more contextualised insights into trends toward increasing student instrumentality in and beyond Nigeria, and advances threshold concept theory by offering an African perspective on a pedagogical approach that has predominantly been examined in Western contexts.