Olusegun Pelumi Olukoga
I. The Policy and What It Actually Says
On May 11, 2026, the Federal Government announced a significant change to Nigeria’s tertiary admissions process. At the 2026 Policy Meeting on Admissions to Tertiary Institutions held in Abuja, the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, declared that candidates seeking admission into the National Certificate in Education (NCE) programme would no longer be required to sit the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), provided they hold a minimum of four O-level credit passes in relevant subjects. The exemption extends to candidates applying for National Diploma programmes in non-technology agricultural and agriculture-related courses in polytechnics and monotechnics. The UTME has, since its establishment, served as the principal entrance examination for most first-year tertiary admissions in Nigeria, covering universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education. This new policy creates an alternative admission pathway for specific categories of candidates, outside the examination route, while retaining the requirement for JAMB registration and credentials verification.
Although candidates are exempt from sitting the UTME, they remain subject to JAMB registration and institutional screening. As confirmed by the Minister, all candidates under this policy must still register with JAMB. Their credentials must be screened, verified, and certified before admission letters are issued through the Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS). The policy removes the examination hurdle while preserving the regulatory and administrative framework through which admissions are processed. This distinction is important for public understanding. The policy is a targeted exemption for two specific programme categories, not a dismantling of the UTME as an institution. Candidates seeking admission into universities or into technology-based agricultural programmes remain subject to the existing examination requirements.
Within hours of JAMB’s official announcement on X, the message circulated widely as a blanket exemption for all education and agriculture applicants at every level. A fact-check published by TheCable clarified the boundaries: the exemption applies to NCE programmes in colleges of education and to ND programmes in non-technology agricultural courses in polytechnics and monotechnics. It does not apply to all students seeking education or agriculture-related degrees at universities. The miscommunication is a policy failure in its own right. Decisions that affect the academic futures of hundreds of thousands of Nigerians require communication that is precise, publicly accessible, and distributed through channels that reach prospective candidates directly. JAMB and the Ministry of Education bear responsibility for ensuring that eligibility criteria are communicated without ambiguity, and that the institutions responsible for screening and admitting candidates under this policy understand the full scope of what is now required of them.
II. Why These Two Sectors Were Chosen
The choice to exempt Education programmes from the UTME is grounded in a documented national reality. Nigeria faces a teacher shortage that affects the quality of learning across its basic and secondary school system. Teacher education programmes, particularly at the NCE level in colleges of education, have consistently attracted fewer applicants than their enrolment capacity. The UTME requirement has been identified by government as one factor limiting access from entering the teaching profession through the formal training route. A policy that reduces the examination barrier for prospective teachers responds directly to this shortfall. The minimum of four O-level credit passes retained as the entry standard ensures that candidates bring a baseline of secondary school achievement into the programme. The argument for this exemption is grounded in evidence of need, and that the Education exemption appears to have the stronger policy justification.
Minister Alausa, speaking on Channels Television the day after the announcement, linked the Agriculture exemption explicitly to food security. He stated that Nigeria requires formally trained agricultural manpower at the polytechnic and monotechnic level, and that lowering the entry barrier for non-technology agricultural courses would increase the pipeline of trained professionals working in the sector. He projected that the combined effect of both exemptions would increase total tertiary admissions to approximately 1.5 million students, doubling the figures recorded in the two preceding years. Agriculture has long been treated as a second-choice field within Nigeria’s tertiary education system. Low enrolment in agricultural programmes at the National Diploma level has contributed to gaps in trained capacity within farming, processing, and supply chain management. The policy acknowledges this gap directly. The writer supports this rationale while noting that the measure of success must go beyond admission numbers to include programme completion rates, graduate employment outcomes, and actual contribution to agricultural productivity.
| “This 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.” — Minister Tunji Alausa, May 2026 |
III. The UTME’s Record of Systemic Failures
The 2025 examination generated widespread concern after an unusually high proportion of candidates scored below 200e: over 1.5 million of the 1.9 million candidates who sat the examination scored below 200 out of 400 marks. JAMB subsequently acknowledged technical errors at 157 examination centres, primarily in Lagos and the South-east, and confirmed that 379,997 candidates were affected and would be invited to retake the examination. Several affected candidates and advocacy groups initiated legal action against the board. The then JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, publicly apologised following the technical failures that affected the 2025 UTME. The 2025 crisis was not a standalone event. It was the most visible episode in a documented pattern of examination disruption. Reports from that cycle also included allegations, raised by the Ohanaeze Youth Council and the ASUU chapter at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, that the mass failure disproportionately affected candidates from the South-east and from Igbo students studying in Lagos. JAMB did not confirm this allegation, and the official account attributed the errors to technical failures at specific centres rather than to any deliberate targeting.
The pattern continued into the 2026 examination cycle. The mock UTME held on March 27, 2026 was disrupted by technical failures at multiple centres across the country. Many candidates arrived at their centres as early as 6 a.m. but the examination did not commence until approximately 1:30 p.m. JAMB subsequently delisted 23 Computer-Based Test centres across 11 states and the Federal Capital Territory, and issued formal warnings to 88 additional centres. The board’s public communications adviser assured candidates that all affected examinations would be rescheduled. These failures do not invalidate the UTME as a policy instrument. They do establish that the examination system through which millions of candidates pass annually is operating under significant technical and infrastructural strain. This background matters when evaluating the alternative pathway created by the new exemption, because the institutions now charged with screening and admitting candidates in place of the UTME will need to meet a standard of rigour that the centralised system has itself struggled to maintain consistently.
IV. What Effective Implementation Requires
The exemption policy transfers the quality assurance function from JAMB’s centralised examination to institutional-level screening. This is a workable arrangement only if the standards for that screening are defined, published, and applied consistently across all participating colleges of education and polytechnics. Without a national minimum standard, the quality of the admissions process will vary significantly between institutions, and the candidates admitted through this pathway will enter programmes with unequal levels of preparation. The Federal Ministry of Education and JAMB must jointly publish clear guidelines specifying what institutional screening must include, what documentation is required, and how compliance will be verified. This is not an extraordinary demand. It is the basic condition for a policy that distributes admissions authority to hundreds of institutions across thirty-six states and the Federal Capital Territory.
The Central Admissions Processing System has been designated as the verification and certification mechanism for candidates admitted under this policy. Given JAMB’s documented history of technical failures in its examination infrastructure, the assumption that CAPS will function reliably and at increased scale without additional resourcing and oversight is not warranted. The government must invest in the technical capacity of the system, ensure adequate staffing at the institutional level for credential verification, and establish a public monitoring framework so that bottlenecks and failures are identified and addressed in real time.
Minister Alausa’s projection of 1.5 million additional admissions is a headline figure. It measures the opening of an opportunity. It does not measure whether that opportunity is being used effectively or whether it is producing graduates who are prepared for the roles they will occupy. The government must commit to tracking programme completion rates, professional certification outcomes, and graduate employment data for candidates admitted through this new pathway. For the Education exemption, the relevant outcome measure is the quality of teachers entering Nigerian classrooms. For the Agriculture exemption, it is whether graduates are contributing to agricultural productivity and food supply at the community level. A policy that increases admissions without improving these downstream outcomes has not solved the problem it was designed to address. It has only delayed its reckoning.
In conclusion, the decision to exempt NCE and non-technology agriculture ND candidates from the UTME requirement is a reasonable and evidence-based policy response to documented shortfalls in teacher education and agricultural training in Nigeria. The retention of JAMB registration and CAPS verification as mandatory steps reflects an appropriate effort to preserve the integrity of the admissions process while lowering the entry barrier for two sectors of clear national importance. The policy is not without risk. The transfer of quality assurance responsibility to individual institutions, without published national standards or a funded monitoring framework, creates conditions in which the exemption could produce admissions without genuine preparation. It can be argued that this risk is manageable, but only if the government treats implementation with the same urgency it applied to the announcement. Nigeria’s education system has a documented pattern of sound policy announcements followed by insufficient implementation. The UTME exemption for Education and Agriculture candidates must not follow that pattern. The policy, as announced at the 2026 JAMB Admissions Policy Meeting, creates a viable pathway for candidates who can contribute meaningfully to teaching and agriculture in Nigeria. Whether they reach that contribution depends on the seriousness with which institutions screen, train, and support them from the point of admission forward.
Access is the beginning. Quality is the obligation that follows.
‘Pelumi, a Broadcast Journalist, Student, and Researcher.
Wrote via: olusegunolukoga@gmail.com
