10th U6+ Consortium of African Universities International Conference

Nigeria produces over 500,000 university graduates annually, yet graduate unemployment among those under 35 exceeds 50%. Employers consistently report mismatches between certified qualifications and actual competencies, creating a paradox of mass credential production alongside widespread labour market exclusion. Despite the scale of this crisis, Nigerian policy discourse frames it narrowly as a supply-demand imbalance, overlooking the deeper structural problem of credential inflation, where credentials become decoupled from genuine competence.This gap is significant. No existing study has applied Collins's credential society thesis or Spence's signalling theory to the Nigerian higher education context, leaving the sociological mechanisms driving graduate unemployment largely unexplained. This study addresses that absence by investigating how the rapid expansion of university credentials has altered the signalling value of degrees and what consequences this carries for social mobility and human capital development.A sequential mixed-methods design was employed. Phase one analysed National Bureau of Statistics labour force data from 2010 to 2024 alongside 1,200 job advertisements to identify credential escalation patterns. Phase two comprised 90 HR manager interviews across Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt, supplemented by 45 graduate interviews and 20 university lecturer interviews. OLS regression controlled for sector and qualification level.Three key findings emerged. First, entry-level credential requirements escalated by an average of 1.4 qualification levels between 2010 and 2024, without evidence of increased task complexity. Second, 68% of HR managers rely on social capital proxies, including university tier, spoken English, and family networks, as primary hiring criteria. Third, graduates from lower-tier institutions face a 40% starting salary penalty compared to federal university peers with equivalent measured skills.These findings confirm that Nigeria's graduate unemployment crisis is fundamentally a sociological problem of credential market failure rather than a skills gap. Addressing it requires competency-based hiring frameworks, national skills assessment infrastructure, and expanded micro-credential pathways.