The Federal Government has express regret that over 20 per cent of
eligible candidates who sit for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation
Examination (UTME) conducted by the Joint Admission and Matriculation
Board (JAMB) annually are unable to secured admission into universities.
This was made know by the Minister of Education, Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau.
Shekarau,
who spoke on Tuesday, in Abuja, at a news conference to unveil
activities marking 2015 Commonwealth Day Celebration, said this was
because Nigerian universities had low absorption capacity.
The
minister noted the conventional Nigerian higher education system was
hard pressed to meet the demands of the ever-growing population of the
country for highly accessible, affordable and qualitative education.
Shekarau,
however, said the Federal Government had strengthened the Open and
Distance Learning in line with the objective of the Commonwealth of
Learning (COL), which Nigeria was a major donor, to alleviate the
problem.
According to him, the National Open University of
Nigeria (NOUN), operating the ODL, had been at the vanguard of improving
access and equity in Nigerian education sector, since its inception in
2003.
He said: “ODL has been embraced as an effective alternative
mode of learning, ensuring that higher education is not kept for the
limited and exclusive few.”
He said the theme of this year’s
Commonwealth Day Celebration: “A Young Commonwealth” was apt in view of
the fact that people aged 29 and under, account for the majority of the
Commonwealth population, saying these young people played significant
role in the heart of sustainable development and democracy.
Shekarau
insisted that the development of young people was a collective
responsibility of all stakeholders, including governments, parents,
schools, corporate and non-governmental organisations.
Recalling
some of the contributions of the Commonwealth to Nigeria, the minister
disclosed that in the 2014/2015 academic session, the Commonwealth
Commission awarded 13 postgraduate scholarship to qualified Nigerians
for study in the UK universities.
Over 1.7 million candidates sit
for UTME annually, with only a fraction of them being able to secure
admission into the existing universities.
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