The Joint Admission and Matriculations Board (JAMB) has announced the cut-off marks for the 2014 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), retaining the existing 180 cut- off mark for admission into uni- versities in Nigeria and pegging the cut-off mark for admission into Polytechnics and Colleges of Education (COEs) at 150.

The decision to retain the exiting cut-off marks was reached at the 5th Combined Policy Meeting of stakeholders, including Vice- Chancellors, Rectors and Provosts, on admissions to tertiary institutions, held at the National Universities Commission, Abuja.
Declaring the Meeting open, the Supervising Minister of Education, Barr. Nyesom Wike, frowned at the inability of some tertiary institutions in the country to fully utilise their admission quota and urged the institutions to ensure that all the admission spaces in their schools were adequately utilised.

He said, “I have been briefed that despite the rising demand for high- er education vis-a-vis the avail- ability of a large number of qualified candidates, some institutions did not fully utilise the admissions quota approved for them by the relevant regulatory agencies in 2013. “This disservice to the Nigerian child is totally unacceptable. In line with the efforts of the Federal Government to improve access, let me urge you all to, with effect from today, work assiduously to ensure that all admission spaces in your institutions, for the current year, are fully utilised within the approved time-frame.”

The Minister disclosed that the Federal Government was current- ly putting necessary structures in place to replace the existing pa- per examination mode with the Computer Based Test (CBT) at all levels of education in the country and commended JAMB for its innovation, particularly, the introduction of the biometric data capture and verification, and the CBT mode, which he noted, had greatly improved efficiency and further protected the integrity and credibility of its examinations. Barr. Wike informed the meeting that the Federal Ministry of Education (FME) had already made Information and Communications Technology (ICT) training, part of the standard curriculum at the secondary school level, in order to prepare Nigerian youths for the challenges of globalisation and ensure that their skills were at par with their peers in the developed countries.

Speaking, the Chairman of the Governing Board, JAMB, Barr. Peter Eze, urged Tertiary Institutions to strictly adhere to the 60:40 Science to Arts ratio for conventional institutions and the 70:30 Technology to non-Technology ratio for specialised institutions, which were aimed at ensuring the technical advancement of the country.

The Chairman equally urged federal and state-owned institutions to abide by the guidelines approved by Government to promote unity, integration, geographical spread and equity. “Accordingly, the 45:35:20 admissions quota for the merit, catchment areas and
educationally less developed states criteria, should be complied with.”

The Registrar and Chief Executive, JAMB, Professor ‘Dibu Ojerinde, in his presentation, gave a statistical run-down of candidates’ preference for tertiary education. He observed that after the conduct of the 2014 UTME, candidates who applied for degree awarding institutions were 1,584,348, representing 97.07 per cent, National Certificate in Education (NCE) applicants totalled 25,767, representing 1.579 per cent, National Diploma (ND) had 22,072, representing 1.349 per cent while the National Innovation Diploma (NID) had just 46, representing 0.003 per cent.

Professor Ojerinde, who thanked stakeholders in the sector for the unanimous decision in retaining the cut-off marks for Tertiary Institutions, won- dered why most Nigerians shied away from polytechnic and technical education.He also counselled Nigerians to embrace technical education.

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