The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) on Monday called on government-owned tertiary institutions to embark on more studies and researches for easy access to the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND).
The Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Is’haq Oloyede made the call in Abeokuta at inauguration of the Ogun 2017 Education Summit.
Oloyede spoke on the theme, “Baseline and Assessment: Improving Access, Quality And Equity In Tertiary Education in Ogun State.”
The registrar said that the TETFUND, which replaced the Nigeria Education Bank, had been the saving grace for government-owned institutions in the country.
“For TETFUND, students would have paid for all the services in the institutions and majority of them would not have been able to afford the fees that would have been charged.
“The alternative would have been decay or lack of qualities in government-owned tertiary institutions,” he said.
The don noted that Ogun had enjoyed tremendous goodwill in the area of education by hosting the highest number of universities in the country.
He said that consistently over the years, the state ranked among the first 10 states with highest applications for tertiary institutions.
He, however, expressed concern that the situation had not translated to a corresponding ranking in admission provided by Ogun universities to Nigerian students.
Oloyede urged the state government to take advantage of the National Open University (NOUN) and consider conversion of more old polytechnics and colleges of Educations to degree awarding institutions or universities for increased capacity for provision of admission to students.
He expressed concern that over the 1. 7 million candidates applied for admission vacancies to fill 864,000 spaces in the registration for the 2017 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
“It should be noted that it is not all the 1. 7 million candidates that are qualified for admission and registration in the tertiary institutions.
“Many of the candidates do not possess the requisite qualifications for their choices of courses and programmes,” he said.
As parts of effort to move education forward in the state, Oloyede urged the state government to set up its own education trust fund for assisting indigent students to fund their education and make it affordable.
He called for the establishment of Tertiary Admission Monitoring Committee to monitor the application and admission of state indigenes to tertiary institutions.
The state governor, Sen. Ibikunle Amosun said that education occupied prime position in his mission to rebuild Ogun.
According to him, his administration has in the last six years invested over N60billion in education as parts of efforts to develop the sector.
Amosun said that the state government allocated over 20 per cent of the total 2017 budget to education sector in pursuit of the UN’s target.
The governor, who recalled that his administration on assumption in 2011 was faced with confounding challenges, said that with proper diagnosis and appropriate interventions, the sector had moved to an enviable height as at date.
“Today, I am happy to report that Ogun is fast becoming the education capital of Nigeria with 1, 495 public primary schools and 2, 144 approved private nursery and primary school with a combined population of 717, 911 students in primary schools across the state.
“We also have 474 public secondary schools and 568 approved private secondary schools with a combined population of 498,154 secondary school students,” he said.
He called for partnerships from various old students associations and various firms operating in the state to consider adoption of schools as part of their corporate social responsibilities.