By Dele Sobowale

“More universities worsening unemployment, says NDE.” PUNCH, June 10, 2015, p 6.

The surest way to incur the wrath of a lot of “sensible” people, including well-educated individuals, is to question conventional “wisdom.” It was the practice in every country in Europe to ostracize or even kill anyone advancing what is regarded as heresy or blaspheme.

Socrates, 469-399 B.C, the Greek philosopher, was forced to drink hemlock (poison) for refusing to believe in “established” truths. Galileo, 1564-1642, the Italian physicist and astronomer, who proved that the Sun, not our planet Earth, is the centre of our universe, almost lost his life as well.

But, given a chance to recant, Galileo saved himself by abjuring the truth. Unlike Socrates, to Galileo, the truth was not worth the price of his life. Invariably, when set against established positions, “The truth shall make you free, but first, it shall make you miserable.”

(VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS, VBQ, p 253). By its very title, it should be obvious to the reader that this article is set to question one of the greatest and untested assumptions by which Nigerians live.

As far as most Nigerians are concerned there are more applicants for university education than spaces in the universities we have established. That is only half true.

The problem arises when people assume that all, or even most, of the applicants are qualified. So far that has not been proved. It has not been proved because of our convoluted criteria for admission of students to universities. Elsewhere, the cut-off point for admission for interview is first of all established.

Then the university imposes its own admission requirements which are rigidly enforced. On account of that, not all applicants for university admission are qualified. Most of those who apply to Harvard (USA), Oxford (Britain), Sorbonne (France), University of Berlin (Germany), to mention a few examples are not qualified by the time they have passed through the admission requirements.

Indeed, there is no country in the world where all those who complete their secondary school education are regarded as university materials (applicants if you wish). To be quite candid, most of the Nigerian applicants are not university materials.

In the USA and Britain an applicant must have attained the equivalent of credit in Maths and English before applying. In Nigeria, the university system is full of applicants awaiting results in Maths and English – which many fail.

The high drop out and referral rates in Nigerian universities confirm that close to thirty percent of those admitted should not have been there in the first place.

First line of attack

That last statement constitutes the first line of attack on the widely held belief that we need more universities. It means that at least thirty percent of the seats are occupied by the wrong people while some of the right people might not gain admission. At least another ten per cent of those who made it cobbled their five credits in two or three sittings. DULLARDS on campus.

Let us return again to the cut-off point. In the United States, a central and private body, based in New Jersey, administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test, SAT, very much like our own JABM. Every applicant determines the universities to which his/her results will be sent. As can be expected, the top universities have established the highest cut-off points, as the basic criteria for admission.

At the other end, there are states and community universities (colleges) whose admission scores are lower. Irrespective of whether the applicant is aspiring to go to Yale of a Community College in rural Alabama, he/she is not considered fit for admission unless the minimum scores established by the university are attained.

By contrast, if one is searching for a country where “anything goes” with respect to university admission, he should look no further than Nigeria.