JAMB’s New Policy Is Bold. The Questions It Left Unanswered Are Bolder -By Jacob O. Sule, Esq.

Earlier this week in Abuja, the Federal Ministry of Education and the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board announced policy decisions governing tertiary admissions for the 2026/2027 academic session. The announcements generated considerable public commentary, much of it mischaracterizing what was said, and some celebrating what was announced without the scrutiny it deserved. As a researcher in comparative and international higher education, I believe Nigerians deserve a more careful engagement with what these statements mean, what they get right, and what they leave dangerously unaddressed.

I want to begin with what is genuinely commendable, which is the announcement that Nigeria Certificate in Education candidates and students seeking National Diploma qualifications in non-technology agricultural fields will no longer be required to sit for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), is not only defensible but overdue. According to figures presented by Minister of Education Dr. Tunji Alausa, 84 percent of Nigeria’s Colleges of Education and 62 percent of its polytechnics and monotechnics operated with fewer than 100 first-choice applicants in the most recent admission cycle. These institutions exist to train the teachers who will educate the next generation of Nigerians and the agricultural specialists who will help feed a country facing an escalating food security crisis. Removing an examination barrier that was misaligned with those vocational pathways is not a compromise of academic standards. It is a governance correction. UTME was designed to assess readiness for competitive university study, not teacher training or farming. Applying it indiscriminately across all tertiary pathways was the equivalent of requiring a driving test before issuing a bicycle license. For instance, Ghana undertook a comparable reform in its Technical and Vocational Education and Training sector and recorded measurable enrollment recovery in undersubscribed institutions within two academic cycles, with documented improvement in graduate employment outcomes in agriculture and construction within five years (Ghana Education Service, 2016). Nigeria’s move follows a comparable logic with regional validation.

And yet, scholarly honesty requires saying plainly what the announcements did not say. The first and most consequential silence is on quality assurance. Removing the UTME requirement creates a governance vacuum that four Ordinary Level credit passes cannot adequately fill, particularly given Nigeria’s documented challenges with certificate integrity. The Ordinary Level assessment system has been repeatedly identified as vulnerable to examination malpractice at scale and certificate falsification (Onyibe, Umar, and Dauda, 2016). Building a national admission pathway on unverified paper credentials, without digital verification infrastructure, is constructing a governance framework on unstable ground. Again, in Africa, Kenya resolved a comparable challenge through a real-time credential verification system integrating examining bodies with admission processing from 2015 (Kenya National Examinations Council, 2016), While South Africa’s National Qualifications Framework established a nationally consistent verification architecture that significantly reduced fraudulent qualification presentation in tertiary admissions (South African Qualifications Authority, 2012). Nigeria has neither system in operational form for the populations the 2026 announcements are expanding into tertiary pathways. That silence is not a technicality. It is a governance gap with direct consequences for institutional quality.

The second significant absence is any articulation framework connecting the newly expanded pathways to progression opportunities at higher qualification levels. A Nigeria Certificate in Education holder who wishes to progress to a Bachelor of Education has no nationally guaranteed credit recognition pathway. An agricultural National Diploma graduate who wishes to continue to a degree programme is similarly without a formal articulation mechanism. Without such mechanisms, the pathways this week’s announcements expand risk becoming terminal qualifications, routes that open access to a credential but close access to further development. The United States learned this lesson through its community college system, which for decades trapped lower-income students in sub-degree qualifications with no guaranteed pathway into four-year programmes. The resolution of that problem through articulation agreement mandates from the 1990s onwards is now considered a baseline equity requirement for any credible access expansion (Roksa and Keith, 2008). The United Kingdom’s Higher National Certificate and Diploma framework is similarly built around guaranteed credit recognition pathways into bachelor’s programmes. Nigeria’s announcements expand access to entry points without constructing the progression architecture that gives those entry points developmental meaning.

The third and most fundamental omission is financial. A projected increase from 1.1 million to 1.5 million tertiary admissions, a 36 percent expansion in one academic cycle, was announced without any statement on how absorbing institutions will be resourced to educate additional students. Johnstone and Marcucci document with considerable empirical force that enrollment-driven expansion without proportional per-student funding produces predictable deterioration: rising student-to-faculty ratios, declining infrastructure, and credential devaluation as employer confidence diminishes (Johnstone and Marcucci, 2010). Nigeria’s universities are not beginning this expansion from financial health. The Academic Staff Union of Universities’ eight-month strike in 2022 was at its core a financing crisis revealing the depth of underfunding across the federal system. Announcing a 36 percent enrollment expansion into this environment without a stated financing commitment is not a serious policy. It is an enrollment target dressed as one.

The difference between access to education and access to quality education is not a distinction of degree. It is a distinction of kind. Nigeria has lived the alternative before. The university expansion of the 1970s and 1980s, celebrated as democratization, produced within a generation a crisis of graduate unemployment and credential inflation that decades of subsequent reform have not fully resolved. The conditions for repeating that pattern are present in this week’s announcements, and scholarly responsibility requires saying so. The question is not whether to expand access. With 70 percent of Nigeria’s population below the age of 30 and a tertiary enrollment ratio UNESCO estimated at 10 percent as of 2023, expansion is a national imperative. The question is whether the expansion is being built on a governance architecture strong enough to support it. Based on what was announced in Abuja this week, the answer is not yet.

The examination exemption is justified. The articulation framework should accompany it immediately. The quality assurance mechanisms should have been announced alongside it. The financing commitment should have been the headline, not the omission. Nigeria’s students, the aspiring teachers, farmers, and engineers, deserve a policy that opens the door and checks what is in the room. What was announced this week opens the door. What lies behind it remains, for now, insufficiently examined.

Jacob is a doctoral researcher in Comparative and International Higher Education in the United States.