The National Universities Commission, NUC, has said only 30 per cent of the 1.7 million candidates who wrote the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, will be admitted this year due to limited spaces in the universities.
The executive secretary of the commission, Abubakar Rasheed, was quoted as saying this at a one-day public hearing on the regulatory conflict between JAMB and universities in offering admission in Nigeria.
The hearing was organised by the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and TETFund on Tuesday.
Mr. Rasheed said the limited spaces in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions have made admission crisis inevitable.
Mr. Oloyede said most of the candidates, who sit for its examination annually do not have the required qualification to gain admission.
“It is not true that we have 1.7 million candidates that are ready to go into the Nigerian university system. Of the 1.7 million that took the exam, I can say conveniently that not more than 30 per cent of them are not prepared for admission; they are just trying. They do not have the five O’Level required to go into the university,” he said in the report by The Nation newspapers.
According to him, 80 per cent of candidates sitting for the UTME do not have the O’Level qualifications when writing the examination.
“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 if you do not have the five O’Level, you cannot come into the university. The basic qualification is the five O’Level,” he said.
