Nigeria: 1.2 Million Candidates Likely Not to Gain Admission - Minister

Around 1.2 million candidates out of over 1.7 million candidates that applied to sit for this year's Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) are not likely to gain admission into the tertiary institutions for the 2013/2014 academic session, Minister of Education, Prof. Ruqayyatu Rufai has said.

Speaking during a press briefing after monitoring the matriculation examination at the Federal Government Academy, Suleja yesterday, the minister said only 520,000 admission spaces are available this year.

Rufai said about one million might pass the examination with the required scores to gain admission into the tertiary institutions but it is "disheartening" that they will not all get the admission.

She said the admission capacity will not be "expanded because of the students without commensurate expansion of facilities.

"The facilities available now are just for 520,000 candidates," hence the need for public private partners, coporate organisations, individual bodies as well as states to provide private and state tertiary institutions to assist the effort of the federal government.

Rufai explained that although the exorbitant cost of school fees in the private tertiary institutions can affect access, she said, "even what are being charged by owners of primary and secondary schools in Abuja are much more than what the government tertiary institutions charge. It's something we need to discuss with proprietors of the institutions.

"What we're doing currently is that we have asked our legal department to let us know the legal right we have to challenge them based on the fact that they have put in their investments then we challenge their fees or to peg a fee for them.

"We're asking people to come and partner with us in the areas of access but we're not saying that they should come and have any fees they want.

"At the same time, people have invested heavily in terms of their own facilities. That should also be considered," she added. The board seemed to have improved on the biometric machine system which was used to check-in the students into their examination halls as there was no issue of network problem to delay the candidates.

There was also no complaint from the students who used the Dual Based testing option where they had their questions displayed on the computer and shaded their answers on their answer sheets