The needless uniform varsity entry age
The Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, has called for a review of the admission age into tertiary institutions in the country. The minister, who monitored the recent Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), would want the admission age into tertiary institutions, especially the universities, to be 18 years. He advised parents not to rush their underage children and wards to higher education below the age of 18.
During the monitoring of the UTME in some centres in Abuja, the minister was dissatisfied with the age of some candidates for the examination, whom he said were much younger than the required age to seek admission into the universities.
According to him, “the other thing we noticed is the age of those who have applied to go to the university. Some of them are really too young. We are going to look at it, because they are too young to understand what university education is all about. That is the stage when students migrate from a controlled environment where they are in charge of their own affairs. So, if they are too young, they wont be able to manage properly. That accounts for some of the problems we are seeing in the universities. We are going to look at that. 18 is the entry age for university. But you will see students, 15, 16, going to the examination. It is not good for us. Parents should be encouraged not to push their children too much.”
At present, the age of admission into the universities is not uniform. It varies from 15 to 16 and 17 years depending on the university. There is no doubt that maturity is important for one to study in a university. The craze for university education has led to parents rushing their children and wards to enter the universities without considering if they are physically and emotionally stable to withstand the rigours of university education. However, we condemn such rushing of children to enter the university.
While the ministers observation may be true in some cases, there are exceptional cases. Children have different abilities and all of them do not mature at the same age. At this point in our development, our education system should have a space for talented and gifted children, whose rights to varsity education should not be abridged because the minister wants a uniform age for admission into the universities. It is also worth pointing out that cognitive development in children is not uniform.
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Although age is a factor in learning, every aspect of learning is not so age-dependent. The government should allow each university to determine the age of admission into its programmes. There is even no point prescribing one uniform age for all of them. We dont want one age that will fit all. Some children at the age of 16 had made the best results in UTME. Our education system must have room for gifted and exceptional children. If not, these gifted children will migrate to universities abroad.
There are many problems plaguing our universities, including poor funding, dilapidated equipment and poor remuneration of varsity teachers. Perennial strikes by teachers in the universities over welfare issues have hampered the teaching and learning process, as well as the quality of our varsity graduates.
Let the government focus on how to address the aforementioned problems of the universities and leave entry age to each university to decide. At the same time, brilliant and gifted students should not be shut out of the university system simply because they are below 18 years of age. Moreover, scholastic achievement is not solely age-dependent. Therefore, the over-emphasis on the entry age into the universities is needless.
Surprisingly, members of the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) have thrown their weight behind the move by the federal government to peg the minimum entry age into tertiary institutions in the country at 18 years. Senator Muntari Dandutse, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and TETFund, said the Senate would support every effort by the government to streamline admission processes, especially the area of minimum age qualification for entry into tertiary institutions in the country.
We urge them to change their mind and allow the status quo to remain. The government should do more to fix the rot in the education sector than concentrate on entry age into the universities.