Universities Can Only Admit 800,000 Candidates Yearly — JAMB Registrar

 

As the controversy over the 2015 admission rages, the Registrar and Chief Executive of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor ‘Dibu Ojerinde, has said in spite of new universities that were recently established, the carrying capacity of all tertiary institutions in Nigeria is less than 800, 000.

 

The registrar stated that this was the only available space for the over 1.4 million candidates that entered for the 2015 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

 

Ojerinde, who spoke in an interview with journalists yesterday, decried the current situation, stressing that the good intention of the board to redistribute candidates from overloaded institutions to where admissions could be offered to them was opposed by the people.

 

He said: “The carrying capacity that we have now all over the country including universities, polytechnics, colleges of education among others is less than 800,000 and 1.47 million sat for the examination”.

 

Ojerinde also called on the federal government to remove the dichotomy between bachelors degree acquired from universities and polytechnics’ Higher National Diploma (HND).

 

The registrar stated that the discrimination was responsible for the crave for university degrees at the expense of technical and skilled education in the country. 

 

On the logjam with the new admission policy, Ojerinde said: “We had good intention. We were thinking of the Nigerian child. We were thinking of how wastages are no longer encouraged.

 

“We said some institutions are overloaded and some do not have candidates. We now said let us redistribute the candidates so that they will not lose out finally or delayed.

 

“These two things were paramount in our mind-don’t lose out finally, don’t get delayed admission. If I will tell you that some institutions still admitted even in July, 2015 you won’t believe it when they were supposed to finish admissions by December 31 last year.

 

“We also discovered that when they finished, they were a lot of candidates who could not be attended to in their list because they held on to their list. Some candidates who did not know that they were given admission had to buy another form to repeat the exams for 2014/2015.

 

“I have a data of people who scored 240 and above well over 101, 330 who were not admitted in 2013. I have similar one of about 49,000 who were not admitted in 2014.

 

“I’m talking about those who scored 240 and above. Forget about 200 because they are so many yet our universities are not full. The Polytechnics, Colleges of Education don’t have candidates,” he stated.

 

Ojerinde told journalists that the protest at University of Lagos was an eye opener to the board that people do not want the problem of access resolved.

 

He observed that there was a systemic problem where adequate attention had not been paid to technical, teacher and agriculture education, “to the extent that everybody feels that the only way was to go to university”.

 

Ojerinde, however, stated that a report on the removal of the dichotomy between university degree and certificates acquired from other tertiary institutions had been submitted to President Muhammadu Buhari for consideration.

 

The JAMB registrar revealed that the late President Yar’Adua had given a nod to the removal of the dichotomy and changing of HND to B.Tech, but it was not implemented before he died.

 

He also bemoaned the outrageous tuition fees of private universities, arguing that, such fees discourage good students from financially low background.

Ojerinde described some of the private universities as ‘shylocks’ with the main aim of profit