The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has announced that candidates seeking admission to education and agriculture programmes no longer need to sit the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination. Instead, they will be admitted based on their secondary school results alone. This is a decision that will damage Nigerian education at precisely the moment when the country can least afford it.
Let us be clear about what JAMB has done. It has created a two-tier admission system where some candidates enter university through a standardised national test and others do not. The stated reasoning is that these programmes face lower demand and the exemption will increase enrolment. But this logic mistakes a problem of perception for a problem of quality, and it solves it by lowering standards for some students while keeping them for others.
Start with the numbers. Education and agriculture programmes together account for roughly 15 percent of tertiary enrolment in Nigeria. These are not niche fields. Teaching and food production are foundational to national development. Yet JAMB has decided that candidates for these programmes do not need to demonstrate the same baseline of academic preparation as those entering engineering, medicine, law, or business. A student with mediocre results in mathematics and English can now study education, which means they could eventually teach those same subjects to the next generation.
The problem is not that these programmes are unpopular because entrance is too hard. They are unpopular because Nigeria has systematically devalued both teaching and farming as careers. A teacher in Nigeria earns a fraction of what a banker earns. An agronomist struggles to find investment for agricultural innovation. The solution to this is not to lower the bar for entry. It is to reform conditions in these sectors so that talented people want to work in them. JAMB's exemption does the opposite. It signals that these fields do not require the same level of rigor as others. That is a signal that will be heard, and it will be believed.
Consider what happens in the classroom when a cohort of education students enters university without having sat UTME. Some will be prepared well by their secondary schools. Many will not be. A student who scraped through secondary school with poor grades in core subjects will struggle with university-level coursework. They will either drop out, or they will pass by reduced standards, which means they graduate less prepared than they should be. When they enter classrooms across Nigeria as teachers, thousands of students will receive instruction from someone who was not adequately screened for basic competency. The damage compounds across years.
UTME is not a perfect test. It has problems. The CBT system has technical glitches. The questions are sometimes poorly written. The fee structure is regressive and keeps poor students away. These are real criticisms and they deserve real solutions. But the solution is not to exempt entire fields of study. It is to fix the test itself. Make it fairer. Make it cheaper. Make it more accessible. Do not make it optional for some students and compulsory for others.
A reasonable person might argue that JAMB is simply recognising the reality that secondary school results already serve as a filter, and a second filter is redundant. Why make students sit UTME if their school records already tell you what you need to know? This argument fails because secondary school standards vary wildly across Nigeria. A first-class from a private school in Lagos tells you something very different from a first-class from a public school in a rural area. UTME exists precisely because it provides a common measure. Remove it and you reintroduce the inequality that UTME was designed to reduce. You make admission dependent on which secondary school a student attended. That is a formula for entrenching advantage and freezing opportunity.
What will likely happen if this policy continues is clear. Other universities will follow JAMB's lead. Other programmes will be exempted. The UTME will become less relevant over time. Universities will increasingly use their own entrance exams, which means that wealthy families can afford test prep and wealthy schools can teach to those specific exams. The poorest students, who have the most to gain from a standardised national measure, will lose their most reliable pathway to university. Nigeria will have made admission less fair while calling it progress.
JAMB needs to reverse this decision. Not because UTME is perfect, but because the exemption makes a bad situation worse. If the board believes that education and agriculture programmes need more students, it should work with these sectors to make careers in them attractive. It should work with the Ministry of Education to improve secondary school teaching so that students arrive better prepared. It should work with universities to ensure that facilities and staffing in these departments are competitive. These are harder tasks than exempting students from a test, but they are the only tasks worth doing.
The fix is specific. JAMB should announce that the exemption will be reviewed within two years. During that time, it should work with universities offering education and agriculture programmes to strengthen facilities and recruitment. It should work with the government to raise teacher salaries and agricultural investment. It should commission research into whether the exemption actually increased enrolment, and whether those newly enrolled students actually succeeded. Then, with evidence in hand, it can decide whether to keep the policy. The decision as it stands now is made from theory, not data. Nigeria cannot afford that kind of gamble.
OduViews represents the editorial opinion of OduNews.
