The federal government has directed that admission to tertiary institutions should be given to candidates as young as 16 years old.
The Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, has sparked controversy at the ongoing Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) policy meeting by announcing that only candidates who are at least 18 years old will be eligible for admission into tertiary institutions in Nigeria, starting from the 2024 academic year.
This declaration was met with protests from stakeholders and attendees, who had expected that candidates as young as 16 years old would be considered for admission.
News About Nigeria reports that the JAMB policy meeting is an annual event where stakeholders from the various tertiary institutions in the country sit to decide on appropriate cut-off marks for admissions in the current academic year.
The meeting also sets the tone for the year’s admission exercise and the guidelines by which all institutions must admit students.
At the ongoing meeting, immediately after Mamman made the utterance that only applicants who were 18 years of age and older were eligible for admission, the hall erupted in rowdiness.
It took the intervention of the JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, before normalcy was restored.
While reacting to the grumblings from the participants, he insisted that the law required that their children be in school at 18 years old, having attended six years of primary school, three years of junior secondary school, and three years of senior secondary school.
The Minister noted that the meeting was to ensure that the process of admission for 2024/2025 was fair.
He said the position of the Federal Ministry of Education had not changed from any institution that does admission outside the right process, which is the Central Application Process (CAP).
But the minister later accepted the suggestions of the stakeholders that those aged 16 and older should be eligible for this year’s admission, while the law would apply next year.
