Management Education in Nigeria: A Threshold Concept Approach to Teaching in Public Universities

Introduction

Management education is widely advocated as a critical contributor to economic development, organisational effectiveness, and broader societal progress (Walsh, 2015; Zoogah, 2023). In African contexts, including Nigeria, management education offers the promise of equipping business graduates with the skills needed to think analytically, make sound decisions, and address complex managerial and societal challenges (Honig & Hjortsø, 2018). Research further highlights that economic growth in African nations depends on innovativeness, adaptability, resilience, coopetition, and entrepreneurial capability (Darbi & Knott, 2023; Kupangwa et al., 2025; Odeyemi et al., 2024; Zulu-Chisanga et al., 2023). Ideally these capabilities are fostered throughout students’ management education journeys in African universities and beyond, thereby contributing to socioeconomic transformation in African nations more broadly.

Yet these transformative benefits of management education are not uniformly understood nor valued by university students across African nations (Lee et al., 2018; Napier et al., 2008; Nkomo, 2015). In Nigeria, a significant challenge arises from the instrumental nature of student’s expectations. Students enrolled in Nigerian public universities are less accepting of the societally oriented and transformative aspirations of university education being pursued by government policymakers and touted by management educators. Instead, student’s expectations of their management education journey are more instrumental (Ahmed & Ezekiel, 2024; Akinyemi & Mohammed, 2023; Okolie, 2025). Put simply, many undergraduates in Nigerian public universities view their business degree to be a “meal ticket” in the local language. In this paper, we use this locally-contextualised terminology of a “meal ticket” to capture how an individual student in Nigeria can conceptualise a degree as a credential that they expect to translate into favourable employment and income, rather than the beginning of their management education and ongoing professional development to progress Nigerian society over the long term.

These instrumental orientations arise from how management education is situated within Nigeria’s contemporary socio-economic context. The nation is home to one of the largest youth populations globally, with individuals aged 15 to 35 constituting the majority of the national demographic (United Nations Population Fund, 2025; Worldometer, 2026). Youth unemployment and underemployment remain persistently high and structurally entrenched, with a proportion of university graduates unable to secure formal employment or absorbed into low-productivity informal work (Agaecheta et al., 2024; Olorunfemi, 2021). Widespread poverty, economic volatility, and limited formal-sector job creation continue to constrain graduate labour-market outcomes (World Bank, 2025). Collectively, these conditions shape how students interpret the value of higher education as a “meal ticket.” For many students, a university degree represents, at best, a hoped-for escape from economic precarity for themselves and, often, for extended family networks. At worst, it is viewed with growing suspicion as students question whether a degree certificate will truly provide them with future access to wealth or upward mobility (Alordiah et al., 2023; Ehioghiren & Efosa-Ehioghiren, 2023). This suspicion of idealistic views of management education as a pathway to socioeconomic advancement is compounded by success stories of Nigerian entrepreneurs who have no formal university education but have been visibly rewarded for their entrepreneurial hustle (Okolie, 2025; Okolie et al., 2021).

We take this complex student landscape as the point of departure for our essay. We contend that this meal-ticket instrumentality creates a pedagogical challenge that must be grappled with if management education is to fulfil its promise in the Nigerian context. That is, how can management educators in Nigerian public universities help students move beyond completion-oriented, certificate-driven expectations toward a more transformative understanding of management education?

In this essay, we examine this question by drawing upon threshold concept learning theory (Meyer & Land, 2003, 2005; Wright & Hibbert, 2015), which we see as a useful frame for unpacking the meal-ticket instrumentality challenge and for generating a new pedagogical approach for teaching in the Nigerian context. Threshold concepts are transformative, integrative, and troublesome; they open up new ways of thinking but can be difficult for learners to grasp (Meyer & Land, 2003, 2005; Wright & Hibbert, 2015). Although threshold concepts have been explored at the course level in various management domains including entrepreneurship, leadership, and introductory and critical management courses (e.g. Bissett & Saunders, 2015; Bolinger & Brown, 2015; Donovan, 2017; Hawkins & Edwards, 2015; Yip & Raelin, 2012), this scholarship has been primarily developed in Western contexts (Wright & Hibbert, 2015). Little attention has been paid to how threshold concepts operate in African universities or how contextual factors shape students’ ability to cross conceptual thresholds.

Extending insights about threshold concept learning to the meal-ticket instrumentality challenge in Nigeria, we conceptualise that a distinctive type of threshold concept exists at the programme level, which we label a meta threshold concept. More specifically, a meta threshold concept is distinct from threshold concepts like situational leadership and shared leadership which transform students simplistic heroic leadership assumptions when taught in leadership courses (Yip & Raelin, 2012). We define a meta threshold concept as an integrative concept that is troublesome for students to grasp in a local context but transformative in opening up a new way of seeing management education and themselves across a programme of study. The meta threshold concept that students in public universities in Nigeria are grappling with is “management education is an initiation into a professional and societal role.” This meta concept synthesises multiple nested aspects of capability aspirations, career learning, interdependence, and collective achievement, and requires educators to reorient students away from individualistic, certification-driven expectations towards a broader professional and societal identity.

In the essay that follows, we develop our ideas about meta threshold concepts and their application in Nigerian public universities, where the purposes and promises of management education are continually negotiated in practice. We draw on the reflective experiences of the first two authors who, combined, have over a decade of teaching experience in a public university in the Niger Delta. Integrating their lived experiences with insights from the management education literature, classroom dialogues, and student feedback, we illustrate how particular pedagogical approaches can help students move beyond meal ticket instrumentality and towards grasping the meta threshold concept.

Our essay makes three important contributions. First, we bring attention to the pedagogical challenge of meal-ticket instrumentality in Nigerian public universities and elaborate how meta threshold concepts offer a pedagogical solution. In doing so, we deepen understanding of how contextualised management education can play a transformative role even within challenging socio-economic environments in Africa, thereby advancing scholarship of management education in and for Africa. Second, we extend threshold concept theory by conceptualising a meta threshold concept as a crucial but previously untheorised programme-level threshold concept. Complementing the course-level approach to threshold concepts in prior literature (e.g. Bolinger & Brown, 2015; Donovan, 2017; Wright & Gilmore, 2012), pedagogical approaches for meta threshold concepts require that students engage with management education as an initiation into a professional and societal identity. Third, our insights into meta threshold concepts are applicable beyond Nigeria. Management educators in other African nations and in many Western contexts are facing their localised version of meal-ticket instrumentality (Anderson et al., 2018; Nkomo, 2015), while students in non-African contexts often treat graduation as the final certification step in their education (Gosling & Mintzberg, 2006; Latifi & Kiani, 2024). Thus, our essay makes a contribution as a call for all management educators to become more attuned to how and when students might be stuck on a meta threshold concept about management education’s role in society, which has broad applicability and timely relevance in both Western and African contexts. The notion of being “stuck” or stalled is consistent with threshold concepts being a theory of “stuck places” (Meyer & Land, 2005).

The essay proceeds as follows. We first situate our teaching context within Nigerian public universities before drawing on threshold concept learning theory to articulate our ideas about the meta threshold concept. Next, we present reflective illustrations from our teaching practice, showing how specific pedagogical approaches support students’ conceptual transformation in engaging with the meta threshold concept. We conclude by discussing our key contributions and directions for future research.

Teaching Context: Public Universities in Nigeria

Public universities play a central role in shaping management education in Nigeria, with approximately 90% of university students enrolled in the public system across 125 government-owned and operated universities (NUC, 2024). Within public universities, the Faculty of Administration and Management is one of seventeen faculties approved to prepare students for careers in diverse business and management fields. The inclusion of management education in the national universities’ curriculum is intended to foster Nigeria’s growth and development in business at local and international levels, and to support socioeconomic wellbeing. In 2024, 8% of all university applicants applied to study administration and management-related degrees (Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, 2024). Government expectations of public universities are that graduates from these degree programmes will possess foundational conceptual knowledge, the analytical skills to address real-world problems, and the capacity to contribute to organisational and societal development (NUC, 2024). These graduate expectations align with wider African scholarship highlighting the importance of managerial capability, innovation, adaptability, and socio-economic responsiveness for national development (Darbi & Knott, 2023; Kupangwa et al., 2025; Odeyemi et al., 2024; Zulu-Chisanga et al., 2023).

Yet management educators in Nigerian public universities encounter contextual constraints that shape students’ readiness to engage with management theory and practice. A constraint is the pervasive meal-ticket mindset, whereby students view the university degree primarily as a certification that they hope will unlock economic opportunity rather than as the beginning of their management education. This mindset is a product of broader socio-economic realities embedded in Nigeria’s contemporary history. Widespread rural and urban poverty, high levels of graduate underemployment, and continuous economic volatility contribute to students’ strong desire for upward mobility (World Bank, 2025). Simultaneously, prominent examples of highly successful Nigerian entrepreneurs who did not obtain formal university degrees reinforce the perception that business success, and by extension wealth, can be achieved independently of management education (Akaenyi, 2024: Okolie, 2025; Okolie et al., 2021; Otuohere et al., 2025).

These structural realities shape students’ cognitive readiness to learn about “good” management. While management education has the potential to foster ethical practice, good governance, social responsibility, and accountability (Honig & Hjortsø, 2018; Lee et al., 2018; Napier et al., 2008), many students question whether university learning has meaningful value beyond certification. The perception of a degree being a meal ticket can slide into deeper scepticism through students questioning the value of a university education when its economic benefits appear uncertain (Alordiah et al., 2023; Ehioghiren & Efosa-Ehioghiren, 2023). Thus, meal-ticket instrumentality represents a profound challenge for management educators seeking to cultivate reflective, socially responsible practitioners. To explore how management educators can navigate this pedagogical challenge, we turn now to the literature on threshold concept learning.

Threshold Concept Learning and the Challenge of Meal-Ticket Instrumentality

Threshold concept theory argues that within every discipline there are key concepts that, once grasped, fundamentally reshape learners’ understanding (Meyer & Land, 2003, 2005). These threshold concepts require students not only to acquire new knowledge, but to reorganise their prior assumptions and adopt new ways of thinking and practising. In management education, this process is particularly significant because the discipline includes technical skills alongside ways of reasoning about organisations, people, and decision-making under complexity (Cousin, 2006).

Existing research in management education identifies several threshold concepts. For example, entrepreneurial failure was found to be a threshold concept in entrepreneurship courses taught in the United States because “students may get so fixated on failure’s economic costs that they neither fully appreciate the social and emotional costs nor recognize the potential benefits of failure to entrepreneurs” (Bolinger & Brown, 2015, p. 452). Other examples include distributed leadership and identity work in leadership courses (Hawkins & Edwards, 2015; Yip & Raelin, 2012), and the connection between management theory and practice in introductory management courses (Donovan, 2017; Wright & Gilmore, 2012). These threshold concepts tend to be course-specific and have been formulated largely within Western educational contexts (e.g. Bolinger & Brown, 2015; Hawkins & Edwards, 2015; Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015; Vidal et al., 2015; Wright & Hibbert, 2015). Much less attention has been paid to threshold concepts operating at the programme level, or to how such concepts might be shaped by different cultural and socio-economic contexts, including those in African higher education. In the sections that follow, we outline the characteristics of threshold concepts and consider their application to student learning expectations in Nigeria.

A Meta Threshold Concept at the Programme Level

We introduce the term “meta threshold concept” to describe a threshold concept that sits above individual course-level concepts and synthesises the aims of management education as an entire programme of study. A meta threshold concept is not simply a more difficult or more abstract concept. Rather, we conceptualise it is a higher-order, overarching, and integrative concept that enables students to see the purpose of the discipline, not merely its constituents. While regular threshold concepts transform understanding within or on a particular topic (Billsberry, 2016; Burch et al., 2015), we see a meta threshold concept as transforming the learner’s understanding of what their entire programme is for. It operates at the level of identity formation (Gao & Riley, 2010; Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010), disciplinary orientation (McPhail, 2017), values (Ledden et al., 2007; Miranda Reina & McGinnis, 2026), and students’ conception of their role in society (Chambers, 2005; Mooney & Cockburn, 2024; Vidal et al., 2015).

Based on our experience, the meta threshold concept that students in public universities in Nigeria are struggling to grasp at the programme level can be stated as: “management education is an initiation into a professional and societal role.” We see this meta threshold concept as requiring students to reconcile multiple nested conceptual shifts, such as capability, career-long learning, interdependence, and collective outcomes, into a broader understanding of the programme’s purpose. Our experience is that building-block concepts (e.g. systems thinking, strategy, organisational behaviour) become meaningful only when students grasp this higher-level orientation. Without this synthesis, students may understand individual concepts but continue to treat the programme primarily as a credential for employment.

A key challenge, both theoretically and pedagogically, is that this meta threshold concept is deeply troublesome for many students in Nigerian public universities. As we noted earlier, meal-ticket instrumentality positions the degree as a transactional credential that signals employability. This expectation conflicts with the integrative and transformative nature of the meta threshold concept, which requires students to adopt a broader view of management as a role that contributes to organisational and societal progress. In Cousin’s (2006) terms, the students’ “pre-liminal variation” in their prior expectations becomes a barrier to crossing the threshold. As such, transitioning through the liminal space arouses negative emotions and doubt (Hawkins & Edwards, 2015; Irving et al., 2019).

We synthesise our theory of meta threshold concept learning in Table 1. We developed our theorising based on a structured analysis of reflective teaching journals, student feedback and classroom dialogue collected by the first two authors over their many years teaching in a public university in Nigeria. Through this practice-led approach, we identified dimensions of the shifts in student understanding that are required for the meta threshold concept to come into view, along with the pedagogical interventions that can facilitate meta threshold crossing. As shown in Table 1, we theorise there are four core dimensions through which students frame their conceptual understanding of management education: aspiration; temporality; relationality, and achievement (column 1). The pervasive meal-ticket instrumentality of students in Nigerian public universities creates a default concept of “management education as completion” which comprises an aspiration of certification, temporality of a moment of employment, relationality via independence, and achievement for the individual (column 2). In contrast, we conceptualise the meta threshold concept of “management education is an initiation into a professional and societal role” as being made up of an aspiration of capability, temporality of a lifetime career, relationality via interdependence, and achievement for the collective (column 3). Student learning therefore requires a shift from the default concept to a new understanding of the meta threshold concept along the four dimensions. We propose that management educators can facilitate these shifts through their choices of threshold-crossing teaching practices (column 4).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Synthesis of Meta Threshold Concept Learning of Management Education.

Dimensions framing management education	Default concept: Management education as completion	Meta-threshold concept: Management education as initiation	Examples of teaching practices to support threshold crossing
Aspiration	Certification • The certificate is an end in itself; learning is unimportant • Educational outcome is a “badge”	Capability • Learning is realised and expanded in ongoing application • Educational outcome is the potential for this	• Reflective prompts in case study analyses • Personalisation of manager’s decision-making tools (e.g. strategy tools)
Temporality	Moment: Employment • The salience of the educational experience ends when desired employment is gained	Lifetime: Career • The salience of the educational experience continues across a career in the long term	• Role-playing exercises • Alumni talking about their employment experiences
Relationality	Independence • Management education allows the student to attain greater financial and role independence	Interdependence • Management education allows the student to understand how working with and for others is intrinsic to management careers	• Structured group projects designed around group work
Achievement	Individual • Management education allows the student to gain personal rewards irrespective of the effects on others	Collective • Management education allows the student to understand that personal success requires the success of organisations and society	• Live cases and community engagement tasks

Overall, Table 1 offers a valuable synthesis of the conceptual shift required for crossing the threshold into a new way of seeing management education, contrasting a completionist orientation with a developmental, programme-level understanding of management education. We theorise the default concept and the meta threshold concept not as two opposing categories but as a developmental continuum. Students may move gradually, maybe even unknowingly, from seeing the degree as a transactional credential to recognising the importance of capability-building, understanding their professional interdependence with others, and ultimately towards appreciating their societal and collective responsibilities as future managers. The table thus represents stages or orientations along this continuum rather than discrete, mutually exclusive states. In this way, our theorising better reflects the iterative and recursive nature of threshold learning (Barradell, 2013; Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015) and recognises that students may oscillate between understandings over time (Davies & Mangan, 2007; Irving et al., 2019).

During this process, we suggest that the boundaries of management education are contested by students’ prior experiences and societal narratives about success. This means that the process of crossing the liminal space and grasping the meta threshold concept involves both cognitive and cultural negotiation (Lamb et al., 2020). The troublesome nature of the meta threshold concept is not simply a matter of conceptual difficulty (McCormick, 2008). It is also a matter of identity disturbance (Hawkins & Edwards, 2015; Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010), as students must reconsider their assumptions about what management is, why it matters, and how it connects to their desired personal trajectories. In the next section, we provide more detailed discussion of the key insights of our theorising in Table 1, supported by illustrative examples from our teaching in Nigeria.

Illustrations of Meta Threshold Concept Approach in Nigeria

Our approach to articulating and teaching the meta threshold concept is grounded in more than a decade of practice-led engagement in a public university in the Niger Delta. The undergraduate management programme spans eight semesters over 4 years and is designed to equip students with theoretical knowledge and practical skills applicable to organisational contexts. Students register for courses at the start of each academic year and participate in lectures, seminars, and assessments across a 15-week teaching semester, followed by 3 weeks of examinations. Foundational management courses consistently enrol large cohorts, approximately 900 students per semester, with assessments comprising assignments, class participation, quizzes, and final examinations.

In the sections that follow, we present illustrative examples and personal reflections of our on-the-ground teaching experiences in the Niger Delta, grouped around the four dimensions of conceptual shift summarised in Table 1 and with the purpose of demonstrating our theorising of the meta threshold concept. Prior essays on threshold concept learning have used a similar presentational style of elaborating conceptual frameworks using illustrative examples of classroom experiences (e.g. Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015; Vidal et al., 2015; Wright & Gilmore, 2012). Our experience indicates that when students struggle to grasp the meta threshold concept that their programme of study is the beginning of a professional and societal role, they remain rooted in meal-ticket instrumentality and become “stuck” at the default concept of management education as certification. We have observed the effects in our classrooms when students display rote memorisation, passive engagement, and occasional disengagement, which prior literature indicates is typical for students who are “stuck” in threshold concept learning (Land et al., 2005; Wright & Gilmore, 2012).

Discussion

This essay theorised and illustrated a meta threshold concept approach to management education within the context of a Nigerian public university. This approach addresses what we described as the meal-ticket instrumentality challenge in which many undergraduate students approach management education in predominantly instrumental terms, viewing their degree as a certificate that secures favourable entry into the labour market. We theorised this meal-ticket instrumentality constrains students’ ability to apprehend a meta threshold concept (management education initiates students into a professional and societal role), creating the need for management educators to adopt threshold-crossing pedagogical practices. We unpacked the key dimensions of required conceptual shifts (aspiration, temporality, relationality, achievement) and associated threshold-crossing pedagogical practices, depicted in our framework in Table 1, illustrating these shifts with examples from our teaching in a public university in Nigeria. Our essay makes three important theoretical contributions to the management education literature and also has practical implications for management educators.

Our first contribution extends the literature by articulating a deeper and more contextualised understanding of the transformative role of management education in Nigeria, directly responding to Zoogah’s (2023) call for scholarship that meaningfully foregrounds African perspectives. In bringing attention to the pedagogical challenge of meal-ticket instrumentality in Nigerian public universities, we advance the notion of a meta threshold concept as a contextually grounded portal through which Nigerian students, curriculum designers, and management educators come to understand how learning occurs under conditions of structural constraint. Threshold concepts have thus far been overwhelmingly theorised within Western, resource-rich institutional environments (e.g. Billsberry, 2016; Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015; Meyer & Land, 2003; Vidal et al., 2015; Wright & Gilmore, 2012), where assumptions about stable infrastructures, pedagogical continuity, and individualised learning trajectories often go unquestioned. By contrast, our essay demonstrates how threshold learning in Nigerian public universities is shaped by acute socio-economic pressures and culturally embedded narratives that position higher education primarily as a means of economic survival and social mobility. These contextual features fundamentally reconfigure students’ encounters with management knowledge, rendering liminality more prolonged, instrumental, and identity-laden than suggested in Western contexts (Irving et al., 2019; Lamb et al., 2020). In doing so, we extend threshold concept theory by showing how its core dynamics are refracted through the specific institutional, economic, and cultural realities of Nigerian higher education, thereby contributing to calls for more African-centred management education research (Honig & Hjortsø, 2018).

Our second contribution advances the literature by conceptualising a programme-level meta threshold concept that interweaves nested threshold concepts around capability, career, interdependence, and collective outcomes. Existing studies typically examine threshold concepts at the level of discrete disciplinary ideas (e.g. entrepreneurial failure, Bolinger & Brown, 2015) or individual courses (e.g. Donovan, 2017; Hawkins & Edwards, 2015). We theorise the importance of an overarching, integrative threshold at the level of an entire management programme as a collective good, in which management education is conceptualised not as completion but instead as initiation into a professional role capable of contributing to societal development in Nigeria. This meta threshold concept shifts students beyond narrow interpretations of management learning as a pathway to personal advancement and towards a broader appreciation of its societal implications (Barradell, 2013). In contexts such as Nigeria, where university education carries significant social expectations and economic stakes, the potential for transformation is potentially more expansive for the collective good than has been suggested in prior studies of threshold concepts in Western settings. Management educators thus play a pivotal role in guiding students across a threshold wherein the discipline is understood as simultaneously serving individual aspirations and enabling collective societal advancement.

Third, while the meta threshold concept we identified (i.e. management education represents initiation into a professional and societal role) is anchored in the Nigerian experience, we make an important theoretical contribution through the applicability of meta threshold concepts in and beyond Africa. Global debates suggest management educators in other African nations (Lee et al., 2018; Nkomo, 2015) and in many Western contexts (Anderson et al., 2018) are facing their localised version of meal-ticket instrumentality in which students are questioning the value of university education. For example, instrumentality is growing among students in Western contexts facing high tuition costs, rising levels of student debt, and concerns over loss of entry-level graduate positions to AI (Lindebaum, 2025). Although certain features of the Nigerian context relating to high poverty levels, infrastructural constraints, and the dominance of informal-sector entrepreneurship are regionally specific, the underlying tension between instrumentalist expectations and transformative educational aims is universal across African and Western university sectors. This suggests common pedagogical challenges for the two regions, albeit with very different structural drivers. Nigerian public universities offer a lens for examining how management educators can respond when students’ expectations are shaped by socio-economic precarity and cultural narratives that place increasing value upon alternative pathways to success. Thus, our theorising about meta threshold concept learning as a pedagogical response to accommodate for student instrumentality has broad applicability and timely relevance for management educators in both Western and African contexts.

In addition to these three theoretical contributions to the management education literature, our essay has practical contributions for management educators seeking to operationalise a meta threshold concept approach. Management educators and curriculum designers can choose from our repertoire of threshold-crossing practices including: embedding reflective and analytical tools across the curriculum; designing assessments that prioritise application and critical reasoning over memorisation; integrating alumni narratives and role playing to reinforce lifelong learning; structuring collaborative tasks that promote genuine interdependence; and incorporating civic and social responsibility content and live cases to foster collectivist orientations. These threshold-crossing practices help students develop the cognitive, relational, and learning orientations necessary to navigate the local context and complex organisational landscapes at the beginning of a career trajectory. By integrating and contextualising these practices within the curriculum, educators can reinforce the meta threshold concept of management education as both personally developmental and societally consequential. In doing so, educators are better able to counter student scepticism about the value of their university education (Alordiah et al., 2023; Ehioghiren & Efosa-Ehioghiren, 2023) and can initiate students into a professional and societal role that helps to build the entrepreneurial capability and adaptability needed for socio-economic progress in Africa (Darbi & Knott, 2023; Odeyemi et al., 2024).

Conclusion

Our essay introduced the meta threshold concept as a portal through which students begin to understand management education as the start of their professional development rather than the culmination of academic study. This shift involves unlearning deeply embedded cultural narratives about the degree certificate as a “meal ticket” and internalising management as an ongoing professional and societal role grounded in reflective capability, ongoing career learning, interdependence, and collective achievements. This is vital not only for individual capability development but also for broader societal advancement within African contexts (Ahmed & Ezekiel, 2024; Akinyemi & Mohammed, 2023).

In advancing new theorising about meta threshold concepts, our essay opens fruitful avenues for future research. Researchers could evaluate how and when specific pedagogical interventions are more and less effective in facilitating conceptual shifts in different dimensions of the meta threshold concept. Empirical studies could also trace how students’ understanding of management education evolves across the duration of their degree programmes. This might involve combining reflective journals with classroom observation, interviews, and assessment artefacts to distinguish between performative expressions of understanding and genuine conceptual transformation. Finally, given the manifestations of the meta threshold concept in Nigeria are shaped by cultural narratives around wealth, education, and culture, we invite future research to examine how and when programme-level threshold concepts emerge in contexts with different socio-economic and cultural dynamics, including in Western contexts. Exploring how students navigate the tensions between instrumentalist expectations and the transformative aims of management education in both African and Western contexts could help refine our theory of meta threshold concepts and provide guidance for management educators responding to changing societal attitudes toward higher education. Appreciating these contextual dynamics is crucial for leveraging the transformative opportunities of meta threshold concept learning not only in Nigeria, but also in African and Western contexts more broadly.