JAMB: 70 Per Cent Admission Quota Not Filled for Five Years

• Senate tasks board on transparency, openness

Paul Obi in Abuja

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) on Wednesday said tertiary institutions in the country have not been able to successfully fill 70 per cent of their admission quotas by candidates in the last five years due to uniform cutoff marks adopted by the federal government.

JAMB Rgistrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede stated this when Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and TETFund led by its chairman, Senator, Jibrin Barau, visited the headquarters of JAMB on an oversight function in Abuja.

He explained that the adoption of 180 cutoff mark as a benchmark for admission into tertiary institutions had consistently kept candidates who are qualified but with less cut -off points on the street.

Oloyede said: “Every year, we do not meet 70% of the quota contrary to what people think that there are more people than the existing places.
We have in the last five years, not filled 70% of the quota. We need to ask a question, why? The simple answer is a mismatch.

“I can say it without any doubt that it has never been obeyed. It is only obeyed in the papers. When you talk about the practice of it, there are hundreds of people in our universities, polytechnics and colleges of education that have not gone through JAMB.

“The reason is that we are setting standards that cannot be obeyed.
They (universities, polytechnics and colleges of education) will now go through the back door and recruit people with 160, 150, 140 and some who did not take JAMB at all because you have made 180 the minimum,” he stated.

Oloyede informed the committee that he “went to colleges of education in Kano and Jigawa, all the institutions there I toured the place to have first hand information and they told me; ‘look we know you. You will say obey the rules. This is the rule, the rule cannot be obeyed.’

“Why? If you obey 180, 70 % of our colleges of education will be out of duty because they will have no student. What they do is that they recruit with 140, 130 and they just say let JAMB be doing what JAMB is doing. What we have done is that we should not be saying one thing and be doing another.