NUC: Only 30 percent of 1.7 million candidates will get varsity admission

The National Universities Commission (NUC) has said only 500,000 of the 1.7 million candidates who wrote the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination in 2017 will get admission.

Abubakar Rasheed, NUC executive secretary, made this known while speaking on Wednesday.

He said: “Out of about 1.7 million candidates who took the UTME, it is just about half a million that can be admitted into our universities. The crisis of admission in this country is inevitable. Unless we expand spaces, we shall continue to have an admission crisis in this country. Every examination has its own problem. We believe that the JAMB examination is credible and all of us operating in the system respect the results of the UTME.

“It is not about making money for the universities. JAMB is an excellent guide, but you cannot rely on it 100 per cent. There is a need to further examine the candidates for objectivity and to make the entire system credible.”

Ishaq Oloyede, JAMB registrar, however, said the reason for the limited admission spaces is because most of the candidates who sat for the examination did not have the required qualifications to gain admission.

He said, “It is not true that we have 1.7 million candidates that are ready to go into the Nigerian university system. Out of the 1.7 million that took the UTME this year, not more than 30 per cent of them have the five credits in their Senior School Certificate Examination required to go into the university.

“About 80 per cent of candidates at the point of sitting do not have the O’Level at all. They are awaiting results. So when we are building our theories and analysis, we need to be very cautious. If you score 400 over 400 and do not have the O’Level, you cannot come into the university.”