Over one million out of 1.7m UTME candidates in 2017 have not gained admission and JAMB wants over 2 millions to register for the 2018 edition.
The Registrar of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, Prof Is-haq Oloyede on Monday, January 1, announced that the exam body expects over two million candidates to sit for the upcoming UTME exam.
That announcement sounds like the exam body is going to do admission promo for admission seekers this year. After all, the cut off mark has been reduced to 120 for University and 100 for Polytechnic candidates.
In 2017, 1.7 million candidates sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination UTME but only a few of them gained admission at the end, and that was not because they didn't meet JAMB's cut off point.
It wasn't because they didn't score high in their post UTME screening either. Admission into higher institutions is just what it is in this country.
Some schools didn't offer admission to qualified candidates
In 2017, admission process in some of the universities across the country was fraught with so much disappointment that some parents had to come out to fight on behalf of their children.
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A lot of the candidates were turned down by the tertiary institutions they chose during their UTME registration because they do not have the capacity to take all the candidates.
For instance, over 32,000 candidates chose the University of Lagos in the 2017 edition of UTME but the university was willing to admit only 8000.
The University of Ibadan in a bid to expand admission spaces for postgraduate students admitted 3,500 out of 20,949 applicants that scored 50 and above in their Post UTME.
Lagos state University, which is touted as the best state-owned higher institution in Nigeria also admitted only 3,500 candidates out of 36,000 admission seekers who considered the school as their best choice.
And apart from the universities rejecting these prospective students for one reason or the other, JAMB too was very aware that most of the 1.7m candidates that sat for UTME would not gain admission.
JAMB Registrar, Is-haq Oloyede made this known in October when he said only 30% of the 1,7 million candidates will gain admission.
It is sad that JAMB was aware of the deficiencies of the public higher institutions in Nigeria and allowed 1.7million candidates to register for UTME in 2017 only to come back after the examination to drop a bad news that almost 1.2 million of the candidates will not be admitted.
Sadly, hundreds of thousands candidates that wrote UTME last year are yet to know their admission status at some of the universities they chose.
Most of them are anxiously waiting; undecided whether to obtain another UTME form to try their luck again or continue to wait till the institutions say they are not admitting them again.
Moreover, since UTME was conducted in May 2017, most public institutions have not really admitted freshers because their academic calendar was frustratingly disrupted last year. No thanks to ASUU and ASUP strike.
The admission status of most of the 2017 UTME candidates is therefore hanging and dangling like a sluggish pendulum of a useless wall clock, while JAMB is happily glorifying the N7.8 billion it made from the candidates.
In an ideal setting, JAMB is not supposed to be a revenue generating agency but an exam body that conducts examinations and regulates admission procedures in higher institutions.
However, when a body like JAMB is more interested in how much it remits to the government at the expense of admission seekers, then there is a huge problem.
Instead of expecting two millions candidates that will not be admitted at the end of the day to register for 2018 UTME, JAMB should focus more on how all qualified candidates will gain admission after every UTME and POST UTME exercise.
There is no point expecting to million candidates to register if there are no universities or polytechnics to take them.
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Since JAMB knows the quota of each school, it is expected that JAMB registration should have a sizeable limit that takes admission problems in our higher institutions into consideration, after all, the exam body was established for this purpose and not for revenue generation.