CHIATECH JOURNAL · HTML Version of Record

Assessment of Tertiary Institution Students' Perceptions and Experiences of Security in Nigerian Higher Education

1. Wilfred Ogbu
   Department of Educational Management, Faculty of Education, University of Abuja, Abuja, Nigeria

Volume 1, Issue 2 · Pioneer Volume · August 2026 · Part 2 · e038 · ISSN pending assignment

CHIATECH JOURNAL

SETEHEM · Volume 1, Issue 2 · Pioneer Volume · August 2026 · Part 2 · e038

PIONEER PUBLICATION · ACCEPTED ARTICLE · EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ARTICLE · HIGHER EDUCATION · CAMPUS SECURITY · STUDENT EXPERIENCE · NIGERIA

Assessment of Tertiary Institution Students' Perceptions and Experiences of Security in Nigerian Higher Education

Wilfred Ogbu

Department of Educational Management, Faculty of Education, University of Abuja, Abuja, Nigeria

Correspondence: wilfredogbu212@gmail.com

Abstract

Background: Student safety is a core condition for participation, mobility, learning and well-being in higher education, yet Nigerian campuses face heterogeneous physical, social and security risks. Objective: This study assessed tertiary-institution students’ perceptions and experiences of security across Nigeria and examined regional, temporal, gender and institutional patterns reported during January–June 2025. Methods: The 2025 Zenodo deposition reports monthly evidence from 4,832 undergraduates in 36 higher-education institutions distributed across all six geopolitical zones. Structured surveys, focus-group discussions and reviews of security-incident reports were used to examine security concern, threat perception, coping processes and institutional responses. The deposited abstract describes the design using overlapping labels ("cross-sectional longitudinal" and "systematic review"); this journal update therefore preserves the reported procedures and results without upgrading causal claims or inventing unreported design details. No row-level dataset was available for independent reanalysis. Results: The source reports the highest security concern in the Northeast/Northwest grouping (M = 4.2, SD = 0.8 on a five-point scale), compared with a lower mean in the Southwest (M = 2.8, SD = 0.6). Reported security confidence declined from 3.1 in January to 2.4 in June 2025. Female students consistently reported greater security problems than male students across geopolitical contexts. Recurrent institutional weaknesses were inadequate physical-security infrastructure, poor illumination and insufficient security personnel. Conclusion: The evidence supports a differentiated campus-safety strategy that combines environmental design, trained personnel, early warning, interagency coordination, gender-responsive safeguards, student participation and routine security-performance monitoring. Because the accessible source does not provide the full statistical tables, intermediate monthly scores, sampling weights or inferential tests, e038 limits empirical claims to quantities explicitly reported in the Zenodo record and uses newer evidence only to strengthen interpretation and implementation guidance.

Keywords: campus security; student perceptions; tertiary education; higher education; security confidence; gender; geopolitical zones; Nigeria

1. Introduction

Security in higher education is not a peripheral facilities issue. It conditions whether students can travel to and from campus, attend evening classes, use libraries and laboratories, remain in residence, participate in student life and concentrate on learning without disproportionate fear. In Nigeria, the risk environment is uneven: kidnapping and banditry are especially salient in parts of the North; cult-related violence, robbery, harassment, theft and off-campus vulnerability affect institutions in several regions; and cyber-enabled risks increasingly intersect with physical security. The practical consequence is that a national campus-safety framework must be coherent enough to set common standards while remaining sensitive to local threat profiles.

Nigeria’s policy architecture has increasingly moved toward this integrated view. The Federal Ministry of Education’s National Policy on Safety, Security and Violence-Free Schools emphasizes prevention, preparedness, protection, response and shared responsibility. The 2025 Early Warning Handbook adds operational guidance for recognizing and responding to risks including kidnapping, communal clashes, violent extremism, flooding and mental-health concerns. Although these instruments were developed for the wider education system, their logic—risk identification, focal persons, escalation pathways, communication, referral and accountability—is directly relevant to tertiary institutions. In parallel, TETFund initiated work in late 2025 on a national security master plan for tertiary institutions, with explicit attention to banditry, kidnapping, cyber intrusions, intelligence gathering and emergency response. By August 2026, the Federal Ministry of Education was publicly urging tertiary institutions to deepen internal intelligence and partnerships with the Department of State Services and other security agencies.

Recent Nigerian research reinforces the need to measure how security is experienced rather than relying only on the presence of gates, guards or cameras. A 2025 University of Benin study mapped a campus ‘fear-scape’ and found that perceived safety varied by place and time, demonstrating that environmental design and movement patterns matter. Evidence from Obafemi Awolowo University similarly connects undergraduate satisfaction with the adequacy of lighting, patrol capacity and surveillance infrastructure, while a Lagos State assessment of ICT-based security practice stresses both availability and actual use of surveillance, access-control and detection technologies. These studies complement the national perspective of the present article: student security is simultaneously spatial, organizational, psychological and gendered.

The 2025 Zenodo study is valuable because it reports a large multi-institution, six-zone student sample observed across a six-month period. Its headline findings identify regional variation, declining security confidence, persistent gender differences and infrastructure/personnel deficits. The purpose of e038 is to convert that deposit into a journal-ready Version-of-Record-style article while preserving the boundary between what the source explicitly reports and what newer literature contributes by way of interpretation. No new empirical coefficients are created in this update.

1.1 Study focus and publication-update questions

The source investigation focused on students’ worry or concern about security, perceived threats, coping processes and institutional responses. For the journal update, the evidence is organized around four questions: (1) What regional pattern of security concern is explicitly reported? (2) What end-point change in security confidence is reported between January and June 2025? (3) What gender pattern is reported across geopolitical contexts? and (4) Which institutional security deficits recur in the source and how do they align with current Nigerian higher-education safety priorities?

2. Conceptual and Policy Framework

Perceived campus security is produced by the interaction of objective exposure, environmental cues, institutional capability and students’ interpretation of risk. Crime-prevention-through-environmental-design (CPTED) scholarship has long emphasized visibility, access control, territoriality, maintenance and surveillance as ways in which physical environments shape opportunities for offending and perceptions of safety. In tertiary institutions these features interact with staffing, intelligence, emergency communication, reporting systems, psychosocial services and the quality of relationships between students and security personnel. A well-lit path with no response capacity is incomplete; a well-trained security unit operating in a dark, porous campus is similarly constrained.

The framework used in e038 therefore distinguishes four linked domains: threat environment; campus security capacity; student perception and coping; and educational/well-being consequences. Regional context, gender and institutional governance act as cross-cutting conditions. The framework is interpretive rather than a re-estimated statistical model: it helps locate the reported Zenodo findings within an administratively actionable system without attributing unreported causal pathways to the original dataset.

Figure 1. Student security experience framework for Nigerian tertiary institutions. Editorial synthesis for e038 based on the Zenodo study domains and current campus-security evidence; it does not represent an independently estimated structural model.

2.1 Current Nigerian evidence and implementation context

Three developments since the source was deposited are especially relevant. First, campus security is being treated increasingly as a planning and governance function rather than a guard-force function alone. TETFund’s 2025 campus-security workshop toward a national master plan emphasized prevention, detection and response, bringing chief security officers and other stakeholders into a common planning process. Second, interagency collaboration is becoming more explicit: the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and Ambrose Alli University announced a 2026 partnership to strengthen campus protocols, while the Minister of Education subsequently called for closer links between tertiary institutions and national security agencies. Third, security is increasingly data-dependent. Early-warning systems, incident registers, threat mapping, anonymous reporting and periodic perception surveys can reveal whether investment changes the lived security environment of students.

Gender responsiveness deserves separate attention because the Zenodo record reports systematically greater security problems among female students. National gender-in-education guidance for tertiary institutions calls for mechanisms through which students can report gender-related violence without victimization, campus committees that address safety concerns, and deployment of security technologies. This means that aggregate security indicators should not be interpreted as gender-neutral: route safety, residence location, harassment risk, time of movement, reporting confidence and access to support can produce materially different experiences within the same institution.

3. Method and Evidence Provenance

3.1 Research design, setting and period

The Zenodo record describes the study as assessing the perceptions and lived experiences of tertiary-institution students in relation to security within and around Nigerian higher-education campuses across all six geopolitical zones between January and June 2025. It reports monthly data collection and a sample distributed across 36 higher-education institutions. The same abstract uses the expressions ‘cross-sectional longitudinal study’ and ‘systematic review’. Those labels are not methodologically equivalent. Because the accessible record also describes primary surveys, focus-group discussions and incident-report review, e038 adopts the neutral operational description ‘multi-institution observational mixed-method study with repeated monthly evidence’ and does not assert that the same students formed a balanced panel or that a formal systematic-review protocol was completed.

3.2 Participants and data sources

The reported quantitative sample comprised 4,832 undergraduates representing 36 institutions across the six geopolitical zones. The source indicates use of structured surveys, focus-group discussions and reviews of security-incident reports. Variables named in the record include security worry/concern, threat perception, coping processes and institutional reactions. Regional and gender comparisons and a January-to-June confidence trend are reported. The accessible record does not identify the 36 institutions, give institution-level sample allocations, report the number or composition of focus groups, state whether participants were recontacted monthly, or provide the coding protocol for incident reports; none of these details is reconstructed in e038.

3.3 Publication-update and reproducibility boundary

This journal version is an evidence-preserving update rather than a fresh reanalysis. All numerical results in Section 4 are confined to values explicitly stated in the Zenodo record. The editorial team did not impute intermediate monthly scores, create missing regional means, infer p-values, estimate gender effect sizes or back-calculate institutional totals. Newer 2025–2026 policy and research sources are used only in the Introduction, Discussion and implementation framework. This separation is necessary because neither a row-level dataset nor analysis code accompanied the material available for the publication update.

Table 1. Evidence map and reproducibility boundaries for e038

4. Results

4.1 National coverage and regional security concern

The study reports a geographically broad sample of 4,832 undergraduates from 36 institutions across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones. The clearest regional contrast is between the Northeast/Northwest, identified in the source as the areas with the strongest security concerns (M = 4.2, SD = 0.8 on a five-point Likert scale), and the Southwest, reported at M = 2.8 (SD = 0.6). The available record does not reproduce separate means for all six zones, so e038 does not rank the unreported regions or treat the Northeast and Northwest as statistically distinguishable from each other.

4.2 Security confidence over the study period

The source’s longitudinal summary reports deterioration in security confidence from 3.1 in January 2025 to 2.4 in June 2025. The absolute end-point difference is 0.7 scale units. Because the accessible record does not provide February–May means, standard errors, respondent retention or a trend-model coefficient, the result is presented as a reported end-point decline rather than as a fully estimated monthly trajectory. Nevertheless, the direction is substantively important: a large national sample was reporting lower confidence at the end of the six-month study window than at its beginning.

4.3 Gendered security experience

Female students are reported to have expressed greater security problems than male students in all geopolitical situations examined. This is one of the most policy-relevant findings because it indicates that the same campus security architecture may generate unequal perceived protection. The source abstract does not report female and male means, confidence intervals or inferential statistics, so the finding should be treated as a consistent reported pattern rather than a quantified effect size.

4.4 Institutional security gaps

Across the study, three institutional deficits are highlighted: inadequate physical-security infrastructure, poor-quality illumination systems and insufficient numbers of security personnel. These weaknesses are mutually reinforcing. Poor lighting increases uncertainty and reduces natural surveillance; inadequate physical infrastructure can create porous access and unsafe movement corridors; and inadequate staffing reduces patrol visibility, monitoring and response capacity. The source recommends stronger security apparatus, improved emergency frameworks and inclusive safety-learning programmes calibrated to regional security conditions.

Figure 2. Empirical anchors explicitly reported in Zenodo record 17845277. Panel A reproduces the reported regional contrast; Panel B shows only the January and June end points. Error bars in Panel A reproduce the reported SDs. No unreported intermediate monthly values or regional means are imputed.

Table 2. Source-reported empirical findings carried into e038

5. Discussion

5.1 Regional heterogeneity and risk-sensitive planning

The regional contrast is consistent with the broader Nigerian security landscape and with the logic of risk-sensitive educational planning. A fixed national checklist can establish minimum requirements, but expenditure and operational intensity should be informed by local threat assessments, transport routes, host-community conditions, institution type and time-of-day exposure. The reported Northeast/Northwest concern level does not mean that southern campuses are secure; the Southwest mean of 2.8 still represents non-trivial concern on a five-point scale. Rather, the result argues against allocating security resources as though all campuses face the same threat mix.

This interpretation aligns with TETFund’s move toward a tertiary-institution security master plan and with recent institutional practice that combines perimeter controls, intelligence, emergency response and interagency coordination. A defensible national approach would therefore pair common minimum standards with campus-specific risk registers and annual threat assessments. Such a model is more administratively useful than ranking institutions by fear alone because it links perceived insecurity to observable controls, incidents and response performance.

5.2 Declining confidence as an institutional performance signal

The January-to-June decline in security confidence is significant as a management signal even though the accessible record does not permit formal trend testing. Security confidence can deteriorate when incidents accumulate, when students perceive that reports produce no action, when lighting or patrol visibility worsens, or when communication during threats is poor. Conversely, confidence can improve when institutions demonstrate rapid response, transparent follow-up and visible prevention. This makes perception data valuable when triangulated with incident data rather than used in isolation.

The University of Benin fear-scape research provides a useful contemporary analogue: fear varies across campus space and time and can shape mobility and social participation. For administrators, institution-wide averages should therefore be disaggregated by location, time, residence status and student group. A quarterly campus-safety dashboard can combine reported incidents, response time, lighting faults, patrol coverage, emergency-drill performance and student-confidence indicators to reveal whether security investments are changing lived experience.

5.3 Gender-responsive campus safety

The reported female–male difference strengthens the case for gender-responsive safety audits. Female students may experience security through risks that are undercounted in conventional crime registers, including harassment, stalking, unsafe transport, poorly lit routes, fear around residence access and reluctance to report because of stigma or retaliation. National gender-in-education guidance already points toward confidential reporting channels and institutional safety structures. Tertiary institutions should therefore monitor who feels unsafe, where, when and why—not merely how many incidents are officially recorded.

A gender-responsive system does not require parallel security structures. It requires inclusive route and lighting audits, safe transport arrangements where needed, confidential and survivor-centred reporting, trained responders, clear referral pathways, residence-level safeguards and routine analysis of complaints by gender and location. Student unions, disability-support units, women’s groups and off-campus residence representatives should be included in these audits because vulnerability is often concentrated in mobility corridors beyond the main gate.

5.4 Infrastructure, personnel and technology as one security system

The source identifies infrastructure, lighting and staffing together, and they should be addressed as one operational system. Lighting improves visibility but needs maintenance and reliable power. Cameras create evidence but require correct placement, monitoring, retention rules and trained operators. Access controls can reduce unauthorized entry but fail if identities are poorly managed or emergency egress is blocked. Security personnel increase presence but require training, supervision, communications, patrol logistics and relationships with students and external agencies. The strongest model is therefore layered: environmental design, people, procedures, technology and intelligence support one another.

Recent Lagos evidence on ICT-based campus security and Nigeria-wide security-management reviews similarly emphasize surveillance, access control, emergency notification and staff capability. The 2026 NSCDC–Ambrose Alli University collaboration illustrates how external security expertise can be connected to campus protocols. These developments support the original study’s call for stronger security apparatus, but they also show why procurement alone is insufficient. Every technology should be tied to a defined risk, an owner, a maintenance plan, a response protocol and a measurable performance indicator.

6. Campus Security Improvement Framework

For educational managers, the most useful translation of the evidence is an improvement cycle rather than a list of gadgets. Institutions should assess risks, prioritize controls, prepare people, detect and report incidents, respond and recover, then review performance with student input. The framework below combines the Zenodo study’s reported weaknesses with Nigeria’s current policy direction.

Table 3. Evidence-aligned campus security improvement framework

7. Limitations and Reproducibility

The strongest limitation of e038 is not the size or national reach of the reported study but the evidentiary detail available for independent verification. The Zenodo record provides headline methods and outcomes but the accessible material used for this update does not provide the row-level dataset, codebook, sampling frame, institution list, instrument items, reliability coefficients, exact monthly sample sizes, attrition information, detailed focus-group protocol, incident-report coding rules or full inferential output. Accordingly, this article does not treat the reported regional or gender patterns as independently reproduced results.

The design label in the deposit also requires caution. Repeated monthly data can be longitudinal at the study level without constituting a longitudinal panel of the same individuals. Unless participant identifiers and retention information verify repeated measurement, causal or within-person change language should be avoided. Future replication should preregister the sampling structure, define the panel or repeated-cross-section design, publish de-identified data where ethically feasible, report measurement properties, disaggregate all six zones, and model time with uncertainty intervals.

Perception and incident data should also be triangulated carefully. High fear may reflect real exposure, recent salient incidents, media effects or low trust; low reported incidents may reflect safety or under-reporting. Combining perception surveys with geocoded incidents, environmental audits, patrol and response data, and qualitative narratives would substantially strengthen inference. Expansion should include private and public universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, as well as on-campus and off-campus students.

8. Conclusion and Recommendations

The study provides a national-scale warning that tertiary-student security is uneven and dynamic. The Northeast/Northwest grouping recorded the strongest reported concern, security confidence declined between January and June 2025, female students consistently reported greater problems, and infrastructure, lighting and staffing weaknesses remained prominent. Taken together, these results favour a campus-safety model that is risk-sensitive, gender-responsive, operationally measurable and integrated with wider security institutions.

1. Federal Ministry of Education and TETFund should complete and operationalize a common tertiary-campus security framework with minimum standards, risk-rating guidance and measurable prevention, detection, response and recovery indicators.

2. Governing councils and institutional management should require an annual campus threat assessment and costed security improvement plan, with higher-intensity measures where regional and local risk indicators justify them.

3. Works, physical-planning and security units should jointly audit illumination, perimeter integrity, access points, pedestrian routes, residences, transport nodes and identified hotspots, with tracked maintenance response times.

4. Institutions and security agencies should formalize intelligence-sharing, emergency communication and escalation protocols with Police, DSS, NSCDC, emergency medical services and relevant host-community structures.

5. Student-affairs and gender units should establish confidential, survivor-centred reporting and referral pathways and routinely disaggregate safety-perception and incident evidence by gender, disability, residence status, location and time of day.

6. Campus security departments should link technology procurement to explicit risk cases, trained operators, uptime targets, privacy/data-protection rules, maintenance budgets and response procedures rather than treating devices as stand-alone solutions.

7. Student unions and institutional management should institutionalize security orientation, drills, safety-literacy programmes and structured student feedback so that students become active partners in early warning and risk reduction.

8. Researchers and institutions should repeat the national study with a documented sampling frame, validated instruments, clearly defined longitudinal or repeated-cross-sectional design, complete six-zone results, transparent inferential analyses and an ethically shareable replication package.

Declarations

Ethics and consent: This journal update introduces no new human-participant data. The underlying Zenodo record reports student surveys and focus-group discussions, but the publicly accessible record metadata used for this update does not identify an ethics-approval body, approval number or consent procedure. Those source-study records should remain available to the journal where applicable.

Funding: No funding information is reported in the Zenodo record metadata for the source deposition; e038 adds no new funded data collection.

Competing interests: No competing-interest information is reported in the Zenodo record metadata available for this publication update.

Data availability: The prior study is deposited at Zenodo record 17845277 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17845277). No row-level dataset or analysis code was available to the journal update, so the empirical claims in e038 are restricted to values explicitly reported in the deposited record.

Author contribution: Wilfred Ogbu: source-study authorship, conceptualization and reported empirical investigation. The journal update preserves the author’s reported findings and adds literature/policy updating, evidence-boundary clarification, editorial synthesis and publication formatting.

AI-assisted editorial support: AI-assisted tools were used for literature-discovery support, language refinement, figure preparation, formatting and consistency checking. They were not used to create additional participant data, fabricate statistical results or substitute for author/editor source verification. The author and journal editor retain responsibility for final scholarly approval.

Prior version: Ogbu, W. (2025). Assessment of tertiary institution students’ perceptions and experiences of security in Nigerian higher education. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17845277

Copyright and licence: © 2026 Wilfred Ogbu. Published by CHIATECH JOURNAL · SETEHEM under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, except for third-party material identified otherwise.

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CHIATECH JOURNAL · SETEHEM · Volume 1, Issue 2 · Pioneer Volume · August 2026 · Part 2 · e038 · Pioneer Publication