Provision of quality education entails the development of human capital which is a prerequisite for increased productivity and sustainable economic growth (Lin 2004; Haveman & Smeeding 2006). In other words, the role of education in a nation is to respond to the intellectual as well as socioeconomic gaps. In improvised societies, especially in the global south where inequality is prevalent (Bloom, Canning and Chan 2006), the existence of an educated population would promise an opportunity of socioeconomic transformation through among other things; innovations, entrepreneurship and job creations. It is against this background that the paper seeks to examine critically examine the extent to which higher education in developing countries would contributes to socioeconomic transformation in the above respects. The study is premised on the role of higher education in enabling and sustaining socioeconomic transformation in developing countries through innovations and entrepreneurship. The main research question is, ‘To what extent is higher education in developing countries stepping up to meet the expectation of making a contribution to socioeconomic transformation? The study uses a qualitative research methodology to collect and analyse data through document analysis. This involved identifying data from existing literature, selecting and making sense out of the data in order to address the questions raised in the paper (Labuschagne 2003).
Keywords
Socioeconomic transformation; Higher education; Economic growth;Entrepreneurship