Federal Government has retracted by asking candidates who are 16 years old be admitted into tertiary institutions for the 2024/25 academic year.
The Education Minister, Prof Tahir Mamman made the U-turn in his earlier statement, where he directed the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, to admit only candidates who have attained 18 years in tertiary institutions.
Stakeholders and attendees at the ongoing policy meeting of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, had protested as Prof. Mamman, declared that only candidates who have attained the age of 18 would henceforth be given admission into tertiary institutions in the country.
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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 guidelines by which all institutions must admit students.
At the ongoing meeting, immediately after Mamman made the utterance saying only applicants who were 18 years and above were eligible for admission, the hall erupted in rowdiness.
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In a move to calm frayed nerves, the Minister had asked, “Are we together?” to which the attendees chorused “No!”
It took the intervention of 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 should be in school at 18 years, having attended six years in primary school, three years in Junior Secondary School, and three years in senior secondary school.
The Minister noted that the meeting was to ensure that the process of admission for 2024/2024 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 from 16 years and above should be eligible for this year’s admission while the law would apply from next year.
JAMB’s cut-off mark
Meanwhile, JAMB has approved 140 as the cut-off mark for 2024 admission into the nation’s universities and 100 for polytechnics and colleges of education respectively.
The National Minimum Tolerable UTME Score (NTMUS), popularly known as the cut-off mark, for 2024 admission into tertiary institutions was arrived at on Thursday during the 2024 annual policy meeting on admissions, which was held at the Body Benchers, Headquarters, Abuja.
The meeting was held following the successful conduct of the 2024 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). A total of 1,989,668 registered candidates for this year’s UTME.
Out of the 1,989,668 registered candidates, 80,810 were absent while a total of 1,904,189 sat for the UTME within the six days of the examination.
The policy meeting was chaired by the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman, and decided following recommendations by the heads of institutions.
JAMB Registrar, Is-haq Oloyede, who announced the cutoff marks, explained that individual institutions were at liberty to raise their minimum benchmark approved at the policy meeting but could not go below what was approved for various institutions.
