This study was carried out to ascertain if costs, benefits/returns and importance of university education have any influence on who should pay for education at the university level in the South South Geo-Political zone of Nigeria.  Four research questions were raised and four hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The descriptive survey method was adopted for the study.  The population comprised all nineteen (19) public universities in the six states of the federation that make up the South South Geo-political zone as at the 2021/2022 academic year; while six (6) universities representing 31.6% of the population were randomly selected and used as sample for the study.  From each of the sampled universities, ten respondents - five academic and five senior non-teaching staff (SNT), giving a total of sixty (60) respondents were drawn and used for the study.  An instrument titled, “Investing in University Education: Who Should Pay? Questionnaire” (IUEWSPQ) was used to elicit data for the study.Data obtained were analyzed using mean, standard deviation and rank order to answer the research questions while the hypotheses were tested using z-test statistics at 0.05 level of significance.Findings showed that university educational costs have significant influence on who should pay; that benefits/returns on university education have no significant influence on who should pay for educational services; that the importance of university education to national economic growth and development indeed has a significant influence on who should pay and that government should bear the bulk of university educational expenditures while other stakeholders should equally contribute to investing in education at the university level.The study recommended that government and private individuals should critically consider the idea of reducing university education costs in order to make it accessible for the poor masses; that all stakeholders should be involved and committed to investing in university education; and that government should stop paying ‘lip service’ to education at this level.