The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, has hinged the current proliferation of universities on the increasing pressure lawmakers are mounting.
The Federal Government is facing mounting pressure to reform the country’s education sector. With almost 200 bills pending in the National Assembly to create universities, there is a growing concern that the system is becoming overwhelmed.
He says there is no need to pressure the President to establish new universities.
”We must focus on our capacities. We need to stop this from happening. There’s so much pressure on the President. We have to be at least sensitive to it as well. They (lawmakers) are passing a lot of bills.
”Today, I can tell you that there are almost 200 bills in the National Assembly. We can’t continue this. Even though we have many of them, the capacity for a university to admit them is not there. What we need to do now is to rebuild the capacities to offer our citizens more viable courses,” he said.
He added that the enrolment rate was not commensurate with the recent number of universities.
“If you look at the entire enrolment together, the one percent of private universities account for just 7.5 percent of total undergraduate enrolment.
“The total number of undergraduate enrolments today is just about 875,000, at least reasonably low. We have universities with less than 1,000 undergraduate students, and there’s this intense demand for more universities to be opened.
