This paper was designed to examine the impact of government policies relating to deregulation on universities in Nigeria. It was observed that the Nigerian government is often quick in making policies to govern different sectors of the State's affairs, especially government-owned establishments or parastatals, from which higher education establishments are not exempted. The Nigerian government sees university education as an instrument to gear the economy to improvement, growth and development. As a result of the need to improve the Nigerian economy, different policies have been introduced, with different interpretations, over the last decade. This is an approach that has also been introduced to university education, with the hope of solving funding and mismanagement issues. This paper uses a standard literature review to study the government deregulation policies from their origin and to discuss the findings. The findings suggest that the deregulation policy was introduced to the university as strategy or approach that was assumed to be able to solve the long debated problem of access and funding in Nigerian universities. However, the policy was introduced in such a way that it solved the problem of access practically, but created other problems, such as management and funding issues.
Government policy, deregulation, university, Nigeria
