Commuting Monitory Cost of Operating Multi-Campus Organisation Structure and thier Implication/Effect on Student's Learning in Kaduna Polytechnic, Kaduna-Nigeria

Abstract

Some of the usual complaints/excuses most students give when they come late to lecture and planning studio/practical exercises, or are unable to complete their continuous assessment assignments/homework and submit on schedule are that they either had no (enough) money to pay for transport from the campus where student hostel are concentrated to the Campus where the Departments offering their programmes are located and had to trek, or that tiredness from trekking to and fro their Departments to receive lectures, etc often make them sleep off and unable to complete the assignment on time/commuting fairs have sapped their financial resources at the expense of their assignment. the paper's primary aim is to unravel the causes of the daily inter-campus movement (commuting)focusing on the monetary cost suffered by the commuting students in Kaduna Polytechnic with the object of looking into the implications or effects of this on students' learning and proffering enduring solutions. the spatial location and distribution (organisation)of the different campuses and the administrative structure of the Kaduna polytechnic within the Kaduna Metropolis have been analysed. relevant cmpus (land/space)planning concepts have been explored, namely - 'Close Knit', 'Loose-tie', 'Segregated-Concept', 'Ring-Concept', and 'Multy-Nuclei. It is found that the operation of the multiple-campus organisational/administrative structure by the institution and its policy of concentrating students' hostels in the Main Campus are the remote and direct causes of students' commuting respondents using public commercial transport, with 88.44% of the respondents spending ₦81.00-₦120.00 every day on the same public commercial transport in commuting for learning purposes in the Institution. Affordability of the transport fare was found to be a major bane of the commuting students as 79% of them were self-sponsored. The effects of the monetary losses on students learning were found to include financial incapacitation in meeting the basic students' self-welfare needs of balanced feeding and clothing, and the purchase of learning support items and self-learning essentials for carrying out of assignments, etc. Without an adequate financial base, the learning enterprise becomes impracticable - with substantial negative or damaging impacts on students' academic performance as the ultimate price. Appropriate recommendations have been made to improve the situation.