Beyond Capacity: New Report Links Admission Gaps To Data Blind Spots
Nigeria’s tertiary education system left more than 700,000 approved admission spaces unfilled in 2025, even as millions of candidates competed for places, according to a new policy report that challenges the widely held assumption that the country’s admission crisis is primarily about insufficient capacity.
The report, titled “The Admissions Gap: Who Gets into Nigeria’s Tertiary Institutions, and Why It Matters,” was published by the iRead To Live Initiative, an independent research organisation. It found that of 1,716,154 approved admission spaces nationally in 2025, only 1,009,736 were filled, leaving 706,418 vacant, a national fill rate of 58.8 per cent.
The utilisation gap was starkest outside the university system. Universities filled 785,180 of their 1,060,919 approved spaces, a 74 per cent rate, while polytechnics, colleges of education and other tertiary institutions managed to fill only 34.3 per cent of their combined allocation, leaving 275,739 university places and a much larger share of non-university places empty. The report described this as evidence of a structural mismatch, where available spaces do not align with where candidates want to study, what they qualify for, or what they can realistically access, rather than a simple shortage of room.
The findings sit against a backdrop of consistently high demand. The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) recorded 2,243,816 registrations for the 2026 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, continuing a pattern of millions of candidates sitting the UTME annually while only a fraction secure admission into their preferred institutions. JAMB’s own cut off marks have also shifted over the past decade, falling as low as 120 for universities in 2017 and 2021 before settling at 150 for universities and 100 for polytechnics and colleges of education, the benchmark retained for the 2024, 2025 and 2026 admission cycles, a trend some education stakeholders have linked to concerns about declining academic standards.
The iRead To Live Initiative report called on JAMB to publish privacy protected admissions and performance data broken down by state, local government, geopolitical zone, gender, subject and institution, arguing that the board already collects most of this information for registration and admission purposes. It also urged the board to make public the evidence underlying its collectively agreed UTME cut off marks, and to publish an annual Admissions and Access Report reconciling applicant level data with institutional capacity so that a single admission cycle is not interpreted differently depending on which JAMB dataset is consulted.
On the proposed Bring Your Own Device option for computer based testing, the report urged controlled pilots and independent security and equity assessments before any nationwide rollout, cautioning that the policy must not disadvantage candidates without access to suitable personal devices. It further recommended expanded computer based testing access across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones alongside a free preparation module available regardless of a candidate’s location or resources.
The report arrives as JAMB transitions to new leadership under Professor Segun Aina, who assumes the registrar’s office ahead of the 2027 UTME cycle and inherits an agency still working through the fallout of the 2025 UTME server crisis that disrupted the examination for thousands of candidates and necessitated a mop up exercise. iRead To Live Initiative has separately indicated it will track the new registrar’s early performance against measurable outcomes rather than official announcements alone.
Taken together, the figures suggest that Nigeria’s tertiary admission bottleneck in 2025 was less about the total number of available spaces and more about how those spaces were distributed, accessed and communicated. With the 2026 admission cycle still unresolved at the time the report was released, and over two million candidates already registered for the next UTME, the underlying question the report raises, whether hundreds of thousands of seats will again sit empty while qualified candidates are turned away, is likely to resurface when the next admission cycle concludes.