UTME waiver misses the point

The recent announcement by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) that candidates seeking admission into Education programmes and agriculture-related non-engineering courses in the country’s colleges of education and polytechnics will no longer be required to sit for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination once again reveals how higher education policymakers in Nigeria deploy wrong solutions […]

The recent announcement by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) that candidates seeking admission into Education programmes and agriculture-related non-engineering courses in the country’s colleges of education and polytechnics will no longer be required to sit for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination once again reveals how higher education policymakers in Nigeria deploy wrong solutions to address critical challenges in the education sector.

The board disclosed this on Monday, May 11, 2026, after its annual policy meeting on admissions. “Candidates seeking admission into Education Programmes and Agriculture non-Engineering Courses are now exempted from UTME,” the board stated. The annual policy meeting organised by JAMB is usually convened to determine admission guidelines, including cut-off marks and other procedures for tertiary institutions.

At the 2026 Policy Meeting on Admissions to Tertiary Institutions held in Abuja, the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, also announced that “candidates seeking admission into the NCE programme, who possess a minimum of four credit passes, will no longer be required to sit for the UTME,” stressing that such candidates would still have to register with JAMB.

However, the minister noted that the credentials of this group of candidates would still be duly screened, verified and certified for the issuance of admission letters through JAMB’s Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS), in accordance with extant regulations. Dr Alausa also said the exemption would apply to candidates seeking admission into National Diploma programmes in non-technology agricultural and agriculture-related courses.

According to Alausa, the policy is aimed at expanding access to tertiary education while maintaining admission standards. “This approach strikes a necessary balance between widening access and preserving the integrity of our admission system,” he emphasised. “It will not only ease the pressure associated with UTME but also encourage greater participation in teacher education and agricultural programmes, both of which are critical to national development,” he added.

This development, according to analysts, marks a significant shift in Nigeria’s tertiary admission process, as the UTME has over the years served as the standard entrance examination for admitting candidates into universities, polytechnics and colleges of education across the country. Specifically, the move is expected to affect only candidates seeking admission into education-related courses and agriculture programmes outside engineering disciplines, potentially creating alternative admission pathways through institutional screening and other qualifications.

In recent years, courses in education and agriculture have generally attracted lower cut-off marks for admission, while the marks are consistently higher for highly competitive programmes such as medicine, law and engineering. Of course, the cut-off marks have always been lowered not only to attract greater participation in teacher education and agricultural programmes, but also to increase the admission chances of candidates applying to these two major areas of study, both of which the minister said “are critical to national development”.

If education and agriculture are indeed critical to national development, lowering admission standards in order to attract candidates’ interest is clearly the wrong solution to tackling UTME candidates’ apathy towards the two programmes under reference. Indeed, the UTME waiver, through the exclusion of some categories of candidates from writing the examination, is simply another way of lowering admission standards. If the country continues on this path of policy somersaults for the sake of making specific programmes attractive, there is a likelihood that the trend will continue until no standards are left to be lowered.

Again, this waiver is far from being a sustainable incentive strong enough to motivate candidates. The consequence is even worse when admission requirements are lowered to admit candidates with four, instead of the hitherto mandatory five credit passes, into NCE programmes. It would be recalled that it was the lowering of standards that informed universities’ decision to introduce post-UTME screening tests to validate candidates’ performance in the UTME. Now, standards are being lowered further to accept fewer credit passes. Unknown to some policymakers, teaching is a profession that requires the best brains, not candidates with low learning capacities.

With some of the mistaken solutions recently announced by the government, tertiary institutions are likely to end up admitting candidates who lack the required enthusiasm for education and agriculture and, consequently, graduating teachers and agriculturists who lack the genuine passion to remain in their professions.

A better way out of the crisis of indifference by UTME candidates towards some critical courses would be to make the academic programmes more attractive through persuasive incentives. One way would have been the full implementation of the reform package for teacher education introduced during the tenure of Malam Adamu Adamu as Minister of Education. Unfortunately, this deliberate attempt to invest in the teaching profession, which included teaching practice allowances for education students and rural allowances for teachers, did not survive beyond Adamu’s tenure.

Agriculture, too, could be made more attractive to candidates through scholarships, special credit facilities and automatic employment opportunities for those who choose to study agriculture-related courses in tertiary institutions.

With strategic incentives, UTME candidates would be compellingly encouraged to study education and agriculture-related courses even when the UTME cut-off marks for the two programmes are raised high enough to compete with those of medicine, engineering and law. It is time for the government to discontinue its successive rounds of policy flip-flops on admissions into tertiary institutions.