By Nehru Odeh
The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, Professor Idowu Okayinka, has said the nation’s premier university, University of Ibadan, is the most competitive institution for undergraduate admissions in Nigeria.
He made this known today, on his Facebook page, backing up his claims with statistics the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board, JAMB, had released. This, according to him, is a confirmation of earlier speculation that UI is the most competitive.
“The JAMB admission policy meeting for 2020 held Tuesday June 16, 2020 via Zoom. From the admission statistics provided by the Registrar of JAMB, it has become crystal clear that the University of Ibadan is easily the most competitive from among all the 172 universities in the country. This is simply a confirmation of what we have always suspected but we have up till now not taken the opportunity to interrogate the official data from the admission body,” he said.
According to Olayinka, the highly competitive nature of undergraduate admission process in the university of Ibadan is deliberate and that has paid off in terms of improvement in the quality of educational services offered in the university.
“It is a deliberate policy of the University of Ibadan to be a research/postgraduate university and to that extent the undergraduate admission cohort is usually relatively small, in spite of the pressure from admission seekers. Small is beautiful in this respect as it translates to manageable Staff: Student ratio, and in the final analysis improvement in the quality.”
The Vice-Chancellor backed up his claims with statistical figures JAMB provided, but which he analyzed or easy comprehension. He analyzed the figures as follows:
“In Fig 1, it has been shown that for admission into the Innovative Enterprises Institution, the minimum level of performance was 22.5% at the UTME in 2019. This has been increased to 25% for the 2020 admission exercise.
“The minimum level of performance for the other institutions are as indicated. The best performers in this respect are the Group of 5 Universities for which the minimum level of performance has historically being 50% which translates to 200 marks out of the maximum of 400. In this elite group are the University of Ibadan, University of Lagos, Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife, University of Nigeria Nsukka and the University of Benin.
“In Figure 2, it can be observed that the University of Ilorin had the largest number of applicants for the 2019 admission exercise, with 108,912 candidates. The University of Ibadan came 7th with 63,378 applicants. The figures for the other top 10 universities are as indicated.
“The University of Ibadan does not feature among the top 10 universities in terms of the total number of UTME candidates admitted for the 2019 exercise. As shown in Figure 3, we admitted only 4,122 candidates which is very small in comparison to a total of 12,523 for the University of Ilorin.
“However, when we interrogate the competitiveness of the admission into these Nigerian Universities, Ibadan is clearly at the number 1 spot. As shown in Figure 4, only 6.5% of the UTME candidates who chose the University of Ibadan in 2019 was admitted. This represents 1 out of every 15 candidates. In comparison, for the University of Ilorin which placed second, it is 10.7%, representing 1 out of every 9 candidates. The corresponding values for the others are University of Nigeria 11.1% (1 out of every 9), the University of Lagos 12.88% (1 out of every 8), the University of Benin 14.9% (1 out of every 7) and the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka 15.8% (1 out of every 6), respectively.
