Professor Yakubu Ochefu was until July 31, Vice-Chancellor of Kwararafa University, Wukari Taraba State. He has since rejoined Benue State University, Makurdi where he is a Professor in the Department of History. In this engaging and soul-searching interview with Thisage, he gives insight into the challenges facing Nigerian universities, the raging controversy over the 120 cut-off mark announced by the JAMB for varsity admissions, the recent global academic ranking of universities and proffers solutions. Excerpts:
The JAMB has said the controversial 120 cut-off mark for the 2017 university admissions it recently announced had the approval of Registrars and Vice-Chancellors like you. Why did the VC’s approve such a low mark that is below 50 per cent in total score?
My take on the matter is that JAMB is slowly coming to the realization that the wholesome one-size-fits-all admission process is not working. And if they are to maintain their power as the clearinghouse, they need to work more with institutions of higher learning to revamp the admission process. JAMB technically does not approve cut off marks. What JAMB is saying is that institutions can only admit students who have written the qualifying examinations. After that, they can decide on whom to admit with what score. So depending on the University, the program of study and the number of persons who applied and seat for the examinations, the score will always vary. Also the JAMB score is just one of the criteria used for admissions and 50 per cent has never been the pass mark for University examinations.
This however appears to be the window for admission. What mark do you earnestly think is fair and merited?
Pass mark is more often than not between 40 to 45 per cent. I personally would have been comfortable with such a score. I can tell you that for many courses in the public Universities, you will not be considered with a score of less than 180. Where you have 2000 students applying for 150 chances, the cut off mark for admission is way higher. So for courses such as Medicine, Law, Engineering and so on you will not come close in any University, public or private.
Prof Ochefu
In the attempt to insist on the 120 mark, the JAMB has come forward to add other considerations: That many universities admit candidates who never sat for UTME or with far less scores; higher marks are the reason many parents send children to substandard colleges in Ghana, Benin and The Gambia. Do you think these are enough justification?
In all these conversations, people forget that you can get admitted into a University via direct entry in which case you do not have to write the matriculation examinations. So even where you have not passed UTME and you possess an ordinary diploma with a lower credit, you can still secure admission. The bottom line for JAMB is to ensure that students write the examinations, and have a benchmark score. How the Universities admit them is left for the Senate of each University. If you think a student with 120 can survive the rigors of your program, then best of luck. I will however, be very surprised if any student gets admitted to read any course with a score of less than 150.
Does cut-off mark really matter since the universities can weed out failures at the first major exams? And have universities not compromised and lower standards when they can admit even one student without merit? Remember that they agreed to 180 cut –off mark last year. Why go for 120 this year? Something is fishy, isn’t it?.
On the contrary, it is the Universities that over time proved to JAMB that there was something wrong with their examinations. If you recall in 2001 or thereabout, the University of Ibadan published a report on the correlation between high JAMB scores and academic performance at 100 and 200 levels. A sample study from UI showed that students who had 270 and above and 9 credits at O’Levels performed poorly and were at the bottom of the class at the end of the second year of study. They then decided to experiment by subjecting students with such high scores from JAMB with their own internal examinations and the result showed that students that had scores of between 210 and 240 in JAMB performed better at the internal examinations than those that had 270 and above. They shared the findings with other Universities and that was what eventually led to what is now referred to as screening tests.
JAMB did not like it but there was empirical evidence that their examinations at that time were badly compromised. You had all manner of miracle centers that you could get any high grade from. It was when some Universities now began to allow the compromise from the miracle centers to filter into their internal examinations and/or began to commercialize such examinations that the problem then reared its head again.
I ask this question because if you look at the recent ranking of 1000 universities in the World, only one Nigerian university, University of Ibadan made the list as 801 member and the criteria used were the number of alumni and staff publishing journals in Nature and Science, number of alumni and staff winning Nobel prizes and Field medals.?
Which of the ranking bodies are you referring to? There are at least three of them and they all use different methodologies. In any case, the criteria they use for ranking is such that Nigerian Universities will not feature in the top 500 for a long time. Indeed some of our private universities have a better chance for a higher ranking than the public ones.
Prof Ochefu
There is another arm of the argument that JAMB has outlived its usefulness, as an integrative and a regulatory institution and should be scrapped. Can universities be relied on to stick to a uniform standard of admission in the commercialized system where huge fees differences among public and private varsities now determine choice and traffic of applicants?
Universities have never had a uniform standard of admission. We seem to keep missing this point. JAMB has always set a benchmark. The Senate or the Admissions Committee of each University would look at the number of people who applied and direct respective departments to fix their cut off marks. So in one University, you can get admission to read a course with 180 in one department and you will not be shortlisted for another with 240.
Take Law for example. In most Universities, their quota is a maximum of 300 (for the bigger, first generation Universities). You could have 2,000 first choice applications alone out of which 1,000 scored 200 and above. The Faculty of Law Admissions Committee will then say anybody with a score of less than 240 will not be considered. This will reduce the pool to about 500. They will then begin to sift through the 500 shortlisted along other criteria to arrive at the faculty quota. This is what happens. At the end of the exercise, they submit the list to JAMB and all that happens at that point is for the examination body to verify and ensure that the 300 persons shortlisted actually wrote their examinations. They then proceed to issue them with admission letters. So a lot of this talk having a uniform admission method is rubbish. JAMB is a clearing house and over time it may have strayed away from its original mandate but for all intents and purposes, it is a clearing house and the new Registrar (Prof Ish’aq Oloyede) is trying to steer it back to that mandate.
The second part of your question that has to do with “…commercialized system where huge fees differences among public and private varsities now determine choice and traffic of applicants?” stems from the wholesale ignorance on how the system works. Federal Universities, State Universities, private faith based universities and the secular ones all have their mandates as attested to by their vision and missions. This is a standard practice globally. Look at it from the perspective of a buffet where the choice and range and price differ. So if University of Ilorin has over 75,000 applications for 10,000 spaces and cost less than 50,0000 Naira, what are your chances? Afe Babalola has 15,000 applications for 5,000 spaces but cost over half a million Naira? Benue State University has 25,000 applications for 6,000 spaces and 80 per cent of them must be indigenes of the State at a cost of about 60,000 Naira. So you gauge your chances, look at your desires, you academic capacity and finances and make a choice. If you go to any country in the world, that is how it works. To get into the Indian Institute of Technology is more difficult statistically, than to get into Harvard University or Oxford. Nigerians by now are beginning to understand that it will be easier to get admission to newer Universities than the older established ones, many states established Universities for their indigenes while Federal Universities have their catchment areas. What JAMB really needs to begin doing is to increase the level of awareness of how the system works so that parents and students will have a better knowledge of how they stand out in the admission process.
Prof Ochefu
Lets come back to 2017 global ranking of universities. What can be done to address the situation since ASU may probably continue its tango with government over funding for a long time, particularly now we are in a recession?
There is a lot of ignorance on the issues of funding that is at the heart of the matter. The last study done by Professor Peter Okebukola about five years ago showed that it costs the Federal Government about 1.2 million Naira to train a student in a Federal University in a program in the Sciences that is fully accredited. As at that time the funding shortfall was between 35-40 per cent of that figure. The cost that is shared between the Government and the student/parent is less than 10 per cent. The demand gap for Higher education is over 60 per cent. The Higher Education Participation Rate (which is the rate of population of the state that are eligible for higher education against the current capacity to provide same), is approximately 8 per cent. In other parts of the world the rate is over 15 per cent. If Nigeria is to grow this rate by 5 per cent annually, it will require the entire current annual budget of the Nation to do so. The point being made here is that higher education globally is very expensive. How we are currently funding it is not creative and not sustainable against the backdrop of so many basic and fundamental development challenges that we have.
The current face off between ASUU and the Federal Government has been going on since 2009. Clearly there is a thinking gap between ASUU, Federal Government and the public with regards to how to fund higher education. And as you rightly noted, with the current recession, the need for “ultra creative funding” has become imperative.
How did we get to this sorry pass considering that even crisis- ridden countries like South Africa and Egypt have many universities in the ranking list and Nigerian universities which once held attraction for African students, particularly those from areas under liberation struggles, are missing?
UNISA the largest University in South Africa was established in 1873. Stellenbosch was established in 1918. And University of Cairo was set up in 1908, not to talk of Al-Azar, which is as far back as 975 AD. These are old, very well funded and administered Universities and even during the crisis that you talked about, they remained true to their vision and mission. We lost ours when beginning from 1976, the successive military regimes began to see and respond to the Universities as existential threats to their incursion into the political life of Nigeria. The crisis has been going on for that long and it will probably take as long to resolve. A complete paradigm shift is required at all levels and with our current problems at the political and economic level, I really do not see that happening soon.
Prof Ochefu
Former Education Minister, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili recently said ASUU’s demands were unrealistic in the face of the country’s recession. What minimum demands should ASSU make?
To be fair to Dr. Ezekwesili, it was during her tenure as Minister that the first major attempts at applying critical and creative thinking to the problems of not just higher education but education in general was undertaken. The type of paradigm shift I am talking about emerged in terms of realignment of mission and vision, funding imperatives, ownership and leadership structures etc. All of that emerged from evidence driven needs assessment that was thoroughly analyzed. However, by the time her tenure was up, her successors virtually threw all that out of the window. Indeed while she was at it, there was a lot of resistance from the inside. But like I noted earlier, it is not about what ASUU wants or does not want. It is about what the Nation wants as it strives to compete globally in a knowledge driven economy and society. The current funding schema is like trying to use cosmetic surgery to arrest old age. It cannot work. Cosmetic surgery can only disguise old age. Over time age will manifest itself.
From your experience as a former Deputy VC in a state university, lecturer in a Federal University and until recently a VC of a private university, what would you say are the major challenges facing varsity education and the fitting solutions?
I believe I am lucky to have a sort of three- dimensional view of the Nigerian University system. I see basically three inter related problems. These are the gulf between what I refer to as the “worldview” of the Universities vis-a-vis their governance systems and ultimately their engagement with the wider society. The Universities are supposed to think for and develop or create new knowledge to drive society. 100 years ago they held this monopoly. Now this is not the case. When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Calabar in the late 1970’s between the University Library, departmental library and the collection of my individual lectures, I had no access to new knowledge. Now it is available on my smart phone. The way we are organized in terms of how to respond to the learning needs of society is way too slow for the fast pace of development that is the reality of our existence.
Try to introduce a new course like Decision Science for example, and you see what I mean. From your colleagues who are not abreast with demands of industry and society, to the internal universities processes and the National accreditation bodies it takes a minimum of three years to complete the cycle.
Our governance and reward system is basically flat, response to new ideas, thinking and findings very slow and the perception from the wider society is that we are just a bunch of over pampered persons who know so much about so little. Therefore, internally, we must reinvent ourselves by helping to solve society’s problems. That is what Universities do. We must engage more with the wider society and proffer simple creative solutions and strategies to what matters most to our people. We are not doing that very well at the moment.
