What Keeps Higher Education Valuable in Fragile, Resource-Scarce Settings?

Higher education in a resource-scarce setting is a high-stakes investment. In Guinea-Bissau, students face tuition pressure, limited institutional resources and uncertain employment prospects, making the value of university something they must continually reassess.

A study titled "Perceived Worth of Higher Education Under Scarcity: Evidence from Students in Guinea-Bissau," published in Trends in Higher Education, examines how students judge whether university remains worth its cost after they have entered the system. The authors, Jon Edmund Bollom, Stefán Hrafn Jónsson, Aladje Baldé, Zeca Jandi, William Gomes Ferreira, Geir Gunnlaugsson and Jónína Einarsdóttir, analyse responses from 2,255 students across six higher-education institutions.

Nearly 30.1% of respondents did not affirm that higher education was worth the cost. However, the dividing line between confidence and doubt was not explained mainly by wealth, gender or academic performance. Students' perceptions were more strongly associated with whether their studies felt useful, whether they experienced a positive and safe campus environment, and whether they believed higher education could generate benefits even without formal completion.

In fragile and underfunded systems, keeping students enrolled may depend as much on the quality of the experience they receive today as on the earnings they hope to secure years later.

Access Is Only the First Test of a Higher-Education System

Sub-Saharan Africa remains far behind the global average in tertiary participation. The study notes that higher-education enrolment in the region reached only about 9% by 2021, compared with 43% globally, while significant gender disparities persist. Much of the policy response has therefore concentrated on widening access, expanding institutions and reducing entry barriers.

Guinea-Bissau reveals why enrolment cannot be the endpoint. Students and households finance more than half of national higher-education expenditure through tuition fees, payment difficulties are common, and scholarship schemes are limited. At the same time, estimates cited in the study suggest that around 30% of university graduates struggle to find suitable employment, compared with 25% of secondary-school graduates.

Students are thus making educational decisions under unusual uncertainty. The cost is immediate and concrete, while the payoff may be delayed, partial or absent. The research treats perceived worth not as a fixed opinion formed at enrolment, but as something students repeatedly reassess in response to costs, institutional experiences and changing expectations.

The survey covered six major institutions in Bissau and represented roughly 13% of all registered higher-education students nationally at the time of data collection. Overall, 69.9% believed university was worth the cost, but 41.1% reported having considered quitting because of financial pressure.

The gap between enrolment and sustained belief is crucial. A student can remain formally present in a university while becoming increasingly unconvinced that the investment makes sense. Retention policy has to address not only whether students can afford to enter, but whether the institution continuously justifies the sacrifice required to stay.

Students Value What University Gives Them Before Graduation

The study finds that students did not judge higher education solely by the value of the final credential. Those who believed university offered advantages even without completing a degree had about 34% higher odds of saying higher education was worth the cost. By comparison, the belief that value depended on completion was less influential.

Students who found their studies useful had 1.46 times the odds of viewing university positively. This points toward a broader understanding of educational return, one that includes skills, knowledge, intellectual development, labour-market exposure and social networks rather than reducing the entire investment to a diploma at the end.

This is crucial in fragile contexts, where interruption is more likely and graduation cannot be taken for granted. If university only appears valuable upon completion, every financial or political disruption threatens to turn years of study into a perceived loss. If students can recognise value during the educational process itself, the investment becomes more resilient to uncertainty.

The finding also challenges universities to explain and demonstrate what students gain before graduation. Curriculum relevance, practical skills, intellectual engagement and exposure to wider opportunities may all help sustain confidence even when labour-market conditions remain weak.

For policymakers, this suggests that improving higher education is not only about expanding credentials. Universities need to create visible value throughout the student journey, particularly in systems where employment outcomes cannot credibly be guaranteed.

Campus Climate Can Change the Cost-Benefit Calculation

The institutional environment emerged as another powerful influence. A one-unit improvement in the campus climate scale was associated with 35% higher odds of students saying university was worth the cost, while perceptions of safety also remained positively associated with educational worth.

Experiences such as sexual harassment and financial extortion were negatively associated with perceived worth in simpler comparisons, although those individual effects disappeared after broader institutional factors were considered. The authors interpret this as evidence that harmful experiences may be absorbed into students' wider judgement of the university environment.

This has direct policy relevance because campus climate can sometimes be improved without the scale of investment required for major infrastructure expansion. Clear staff-student conduct rules, stronger safety systems, transparent complaint mechanisms and more respectful institutional cultures are governance reforms as much as education reforms.

The study also found that most background characteristics became weaker predictors once institutional experiences and expectations were included. Gender itself did not independently predict perceived worth among enrolled students, nor did several socioeconomic factors that might normally be expected to dominate educational decision-making.

It does not mean inequality disappears. Women remain underrepresented, and rural or disadvantaged students may face barriers long before reaching university, but among those who do gain access, everyday institutional experience can become more influential than the characteristics they arrived with.

The result carries a wider lesson for higher-education systems across the Global South: access policies and institutional-quality policies cannot be treated as separate agendas. Expanding enrolment into weak learning environments risks creating participation without confidence, persistence or meaningful return.

Fragile Systems Need to Build Confidence, Not Just Capacity

The authors interpret students' behaviour through a concept they call "anticipatory resilience": the idea that students sustain their commitment by combining expectations of future benefit with present institutional experience and social resources. They do not present this as a proven causal mechanism, but as a lens for future research into how educational commitment survives under scarcity.

The concept is useful because it moves beyond a narrow assumption that students simply calculate tuition against future earnings. In conditions of instability, decision-making is rarely that neat. Students may tolerate uncertain returns because they continue to see intellectual, social or professional value in the experience, while poor institutional conditions can erode that belief even when the economic logic of obtaining a degree remains intact.

The authors note that the study is cross-sectional, so it cannot establish whether perceived worth leads to persistence or whether disillusionment predicts actual dropout. Its central outcome is based on a single survey item, and the final statistical model leaves a substantial share of variation unexplained. Political instability, labour-market conditions, peer influence and institutional governance may all matter more than the available data can show.

Regardless, the policy direction is unusually concrete. Scholarships and tuition support remain necessary, particularly for financially vulnerable students, but retention cannot be reduced to affordability. Safe campuses, useful teaching, credible institutional relationships, peer-learning opportunities and regional academic partnerships can all influence whether students continue to regard university as a worthwhile investment.

For Guinea-Bissau and other resource-constrained systems, the challenge is not merely to send more young people to university. It is to make university sufficiently valuable, credible and supportive that students continue to believe the sacrifice is justified. Higher education contributes to development only when access is converted into meaningful learning, persistence and opportunity.