By Kunle Awosiyan
The Registrar, Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, Professor Ishaq Oloyede expressed his displeasure with the low registration of candidates for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination a few days ago.
Last year the board attributed the poor performance of candidates in UTME to COVID-19 lockdown and consequently reduced the cut off marks for admission to tertiary institutions. The lowest in the history of JAMB.
For federal and state universities, the cut-off was as low as 160 minimum, private universities 140, polytechnics 120 and colleges of education 100. Isn’t it pathetic that our future teachers only need to score 100 out of 400 to be at college of education?
However, the board also gave the institutions the leverage to set their own standards for admission but should not reduce the cut-off marks below the JAMB benchmark.
Even at this very low points, there are some universities mostly the private ones that have compromised the standard. They admit candidates who are so desirous of varsity education at all cost with lesser scores.
Good enough, there are candidates who do not meet some universities requirements and also lack the funds to proceed to private universities. Some of these candidates do change of course and institutions for polytechnics enrolment.
Again, there are candidates who do not sit for UTME but enroll for Joint Universities Preliminary Examination, organised by JUPEB to qualify for varsity admission. It is a year Advanced Level programme and the cost varies from one institution to another. University of Lagos started this programme and more universities had joined, following the approval by the Federal Government in 2014.
Most candidates now prefer this because 80 per cent of them always scale through. First, it is about money, then performance.
JUPEB candidate pays between N200, 000 and N400, 000, depending on the university of choice. This is one the ways universities generate money and one of the reasons the number of UTME candidates may continue to reduce.
While successful candidate from JUPEB is admitted to 200 level, the process delays the admission of UTME candidates in that partnering or participating universities will have to wait for JUPEB results to be collated and sorted according to the varsity of choice before UTME admission will be processed.
Coupling with incessant strike by public universities most parents and children who have enough money enroll for private university education and better still foreign universities.
There was a spike in the rate of students admission to private varsities in 2021/22 session.
Caleb University, Imota, Lagos for example has its intakes doubled this year from about 800 to over 1600 forcing the management to speed up its construction of new hostels.
Babcock University, Ilisan Remo, Covenant University Ota and many faith-based varsities have similar stories to tell. These are universities where academic calendars are stable and predictable. Lectures do not go on strike.
No doubt, university lecturers are underpaid. In Nigeria today there are professors who earn as low as N400,000 and PhD holder as low as N190,000, according to investigation but then they must first realise that nobody chose teaching career for them. They did.
Teaching is a profession just like medicine and law. Professionals build their careers to become better and ready to be poached by greater opportunity.
A university that came up with the idea of JUPEB to help weak candidates that cannot score higher marks in UTME and also to generate revenue internally should be able to device a new way of engaging government to improve varsity education and its community.
For some academics, strike should not be the weapon anymore because it has killed education more than it had helped it. Two years ago, a group of responsible academics from the Obafemi Awolowo University came together to create a new idea of engagement that will neutralise the obsolete formula of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU.
This group called itself Congress of Universities Academics, CONUA. It was not formed to challenge ASUU but to refuse the idea of strike as the only way to force the government to fund university education. The Minister of Labour, Dr. Chris Ngige confirmed that he received CONUA letter sometime ago.
Today, CONUA is steadily spreading beyond OAU and should be encouraged by parents and government to cut the tail of ASUU. Members of CONUA still teach despite the strike by ASUU.
Are they under different government? They are Nigerians, they are the real professionals.