Social Responsibility Performance of Educational Institutions of Higher Learning in Nigeria

Over the years, society has witnessed an unprecedented neglect in the area of corporate social responsibility; this situation has diversely been greeted with several conflicts between host communities and the guest enterprises resulting in kidnapping, hostage takings, total shutdown of company facilities and eventual financial losses. In this paper, we examined the social responsibility performance of higher educational institutions in Nigeria. Four research questions were asked to produce the findings that: (1) host communities rate the institutions moderate in their social responsibility performance,(2) the most acknowledged social responsibility of the institutions by the communities is the offer of concessionary admission to indigenes of host communities, (3) host communities expect special employment opportunities from the institutions and (4) that the level of satisfaction of the communities regarding social responsibility of the institutions is very low. The paper concludes that higher institutions should boost their relationship with host communities through increased response to social issues.