Ending Varsity Admission Crisis

MANY of the more than one million candidates who sat for the University Matriculation Examination, UME , do not know only 200,000 of them would get admission. This number includes those who would press their influences to be in the nation’s universities.

The others would have no alternative than to wait until the next year or patronise those who make a living from peddling illegal admissions. Their quota is sometimes from the 200,000 places that all the universities in Nigeria can offer. In other places, a single university can absorb more than 500,000 students.

Shortage of university places is growing. Each year, more than two million new candidates join the queue to enter the universities. Factors like extraneous pressures on the admission process hamper their success rate.

Governor Amaechi Rotimi of Rivers State alluded to these pressures when he told officials of the state-owned university to stick to admission figures, in line with existing facilities, instead of succumbing to pressures from high office holders. He knows that his order would be observed only in breach.


The shortages create good businesses for admission officers and their collaborators, who have perfected schemes that result in universities admitting students beyond their facilities. Nobody is sure of the number of students in our universities as the National Universities Commission, NUC has lost the battle for compliance with the admission quotas it assigns each university.

Professor Julius Okojie, a former Vice Chancellor, now the Executive Secretary of the NUC, recently accused universities of running prosperous admissions rackets. The truth is that wherever there are shortages, illegal businesses prosper around them. Nigerians value university education enough to do everything to get places for their wards. Who is to blame?

For Okojie it is the candidates and their parents. “Everybody wants to go to the university,” Okojie says, as if it is a crime. He said if the candidates had taken places in polytechnics, colleges of education, and other higher institutions, the admission crises in the universities would not exist.

Government created this problem long ago. The discrimination against the products of institutions, other than universities, is responsible for students insisting on university education. Graduates of these institutions cannot get certain jobs. Government agencies that manage to employ them place promotion limits on their path, no matter how good they are on the job.

University education is almost the only qualification for jobs in some sectors of the economy. Most organisations in the private sector have followed governments’ lip service about ending the discrimination. When they advertise vacancies, they accept only university graduates.

The loss is not just to the candidates and their parents. The country is losing its investments in these higher institutions, as well as creating gaps in its technological development.

Solutions to these situations lie in realising that a society’s growth has to be total, with various strata making different contributions. Where it fails to do this, settings like the university admission crisis become recurring problems.