PUNCH EDITORIAL
WHILE the Nigerian tertiary education landscape is plagued with problems that demand urgent attention, the Minister of Education, Tahir Mamman, seems interested in exploring a controversial policy. During his tour of the 2024 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination centres, Mamman said that the Federal Government is considering the adoption of 18 years as the entry age for admission into universities and other tertiary institutions. This is a backward proposal; it should be consigned to the dustbin.
Mamman’s grounds for this retrogressive proposal are that younger students are responsible for some of the challenges within the system. He suggests that they are not mature, unsuitable, and unable to manage their affairs.
He argues that some of these younger students are meant to remain in the controlled spaces of their parents rather than in the vibrant university environment. These arguments are fallacious.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities lends its support to the age benchmark. The President of ASUU, Emmanuel Osodeke, describes it as a welcome development and wants regulators to implement existing laws to enforce the age limit. This is overregulation. The position contradicts ASUU’s consistent activism for university autonomy as the age benchmark should be firmly within the purview of each university.
There is no guarantee that the policy will succeed. In Nigeria, parents will devise unwholesome means to circumvent it, as they are doing with the age policy to enter Federal Government Colleges.
The proposed policy can exclude younger, brilliant, and self-motivated students from admission into the universities of their choice.
In a digitalised world, the policy would drag Nigeria backward. Universities compete for the best in their admissions process. At inception, the Obafemi Awolowo University, in its wisdom, prescribed no age limit. There is nothing wrong with this.
For his brilliant performance, Oluwafemi Ositade, 17, a student at a secondary school in Ota, Ogun State, has just earned a Harvard University and 17 other Ivy League scholarships in the United States, Canada, and Qatar, amounting to $3.5 million. If the policy is implemented, that means Ositade would miss the golden chance. This is not logical.
