Kaduna State varsity plans to increase admission quota

The Kaduna State University (KASU) plans to increase its admission quota as part of efforts to give more qualified candidates the opportunity to access admission into the university.

Dr. Yusha’u Ango, KASU Director of Academic Planning, disclosed this in an interview in Kaduna.

“We are working with the National Universities Commission (NUC) to see how we can increase our admission quota. This is because so far, NUC has fully accredited all our programmes,” he said.

He noted that the institution is the second most sought-after state university despite the fact that it has capacity to admit only 10 per cent of the 30,000 applicants that met the minimum requirements.

According to him, the university can only accommodate 3,300 out of the 30,000 applicants, adding that it had already released 1,854 (representing about 2/3) of the admissions.

The director said the university was working with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) in order to release the last batch, and that plans were under way to increase the number of undergraduates programmes.

He said that NUC had recently approved some new programmes for the university; namely B.Sc. Building, B.A. Theatre Arts and B.A. Linguistics, and additional courses such as B.Sc. Entrepreneurship, B.Sc. Marketing, B.Sc. Taxation, and B.A. Public Administration would also be approved by the commission in 2018.

“We are also hoping that the university’s Faculty of Education will come on stream in the next one or two years. We are also hoping to inaugurate KASU School of Continuing Education for part-time degree programmes as soon as we get the approval from the NUC.

“With time, we will introduce distance learning programmes all in a bid to increase access to quality education to our teeming youths often denied admission due to lack of space,” Ango said.

On expansion, the director said that the state government was looking into the university’s plans to acquire a site 10 times bigger site than its current space.

“I believe by next year or so, it might be ready for us to acquire,” he added.