The absorbing capacity of the universities should be increased, argues JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
Every April, Nigeria performs an academic ritual. Unlike years past, these days it is efficient, computerised, and nationally coordinated. It is also, for the majority who participate in it, a ritual of organised disappointment. This year, 2,243,816 young Nigerians registered to sit the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination. They paid their fees, visited their CBT centres, and answered their questions. We now know some cheated because JAMB flagged over 100 candidates who had engaged AI-generated syndicates promising score manipulation. Most did not cheat. They simply sat the examination, hoping that the system on the other side would have space for them.
It does not.
The National Universities Commission (NUC) has confirmed what anyone paying attention already knew: that Nigeria’s tertiary institutions can absorb approximately 700,000 students per year. That is the ceiling across all 309 universities in the country, federal, state, and private. The remaining 1.5 million candidates, those who registered, prepared, and sat an examination administered with increasing technological sophistication, are turned away. Not for failing. Not for cheating. Simply because the rooms do not exist. The system is not designed to take them.
This is the sentence Nigeria refuses to say out loud: the UTME is not an admissions gateway because for most of its participants, it is a professionally managed dead end.
There is a version of this story that Nigerian officialdom prefers to tell. In that version, the examination is evidence of ambition, of a young population hungry for education, of a board running increasingly clean processes and of a government investing in the future. Last year and into early 2026, the NUC approved 33 new universities, bringing the national total to 309. That announcement was made with the gravity befitting a policy triumph. What was not announced with equal gravity is that 199 of Nigeria’s existing universities received fewer than 100 applicants each during the 2025/2026 admission cycle. You do not solve a supply problem by adding institutions that nobody trusts. New nameplates are not new capacity. New campuses without faculty, funding, or functional infrastructure are not solutions. They are the appearance of solutions, which in Nigerian governance is often more politically useful than the real thing.
The architecture of the problem is this: demand compounds annually. Nigeria’s population is young; the median age sits below 19. The cohort of secondary school leavers seeking tertiary education grows every cycle. Registrations have climbed from roughly 1.9 million in 2024 to 2.24 million this year, a 10.5 percent increase in a single cycle. The supply side has not moved with anything like corresponding urgency. Seven hundred thousand slots is not a new number. It has been approximately the ceiling for years, accommodating an ever-shrinking fraction of those presenting themselves at the gate.
What happens to the 1.5 million who do not get in? Some will reapply next year, and the year after. Some will find their way to polytechnics and colleges of education. Many will fall into the informal economy, joining the 93 percent of Nigeria’s workforce operating outside formal employment structures. Some will leave, and the ones with the resources and determination to leave tend to be precisely the ones the country can least afford to lose. Japa is not simply cultural or even primarily economic. It is, in significant part, the rational individual response to a system that has no room for you. They will contribute their quota to our forex demand.
The downstream numbers are no more forgiving. The State of the Nigerian Youth Report of 2025 documented that approximately 1.7 million graduates leave Nigeria’s universities and polytechnics every year, entering a labour market that cannot absorb them. The ILO has noted that Nigeria’s employment challenge is not merely about quantity; it is structural: graduates with theoretical credentials and no practical competencies, entering sectors that need technical skills the education system does not produce, competing for formal jobs that constitute less than seven percent of total employment.
Read that again. Less than seven percent.
The formal economy is not a destination for most Nigerian graduates. It is a narrow corridor that a relative few enter and the rest watch from outside. The examination, then, is not a gateway to a functioning meritocracy. It is the opening ceremony of a longer process of managed exclusion. One that is conducted with sufficient bureaucratic decorum to appear rational, and with sufficient annual repetition to appear inevitable.
None of this is a condemnation of JAMB. JAMB is an administrative body. It does, increasingly, what it is designed to do, which is to administer a national examination with reasonable integrity. The fraud it detects, the results it releases, the logistics it manages across a geography as complex as Nigeria’s: none of that is trivial. The failure is not administrative. It is political. It is the failure of successive governments to treat the structural mismatch between educational demand and supply as the emergency it plainly is.
An emergency, by definition, demands emergency-grade response. What Nigeria has produced instead is incremental tinkering: new universities approved without new funding models; admission slots nominally expanded without corresponding investments in faculty or infrastructure; vocational education perpetually described as a priority and perpetually underfunded. President Bola Tinubu has introduced some incentives here, but a lot more needs to be done to make this a popular alternative for young Nigerians. Right now, we have the vocabulary of ambition without the arithmetic of delivery.
The 2.24 million who sat the 2026 UTME are not a statistic. They are someone’s child, someone’s hope, someone’s years of secondary school discipline and examination preparation and registration fee money. They deserve a system built to receive them, or at minimum a government with the honesty to acknowledge that the current one is not.
What Nigeria has instead is a ritual. It arrives every April. It is conducted with increasing efficiency. This entire design is an anomaly from start to finish. And it is why it ends, for the majority of participants, in exactly the same place it always has. Exactly nowhere.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/ BGX Publishing
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