A new policy report has revealed that 706,418 approved admission spaces in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions remained unfilled during the 2025 admission cycle, despite the high number of candidates seeking admission into higher education.
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, a higher education policy think tank.
According to the report, 1,009,736 out of 1,716,154 approved admission spaces were filled nationwide, representing an overall 58.8 per cent admission fill rate, while more than 40 per cent of available spaces remained vacant.
The findings showed that Nigerian universities recorded stronger admission performance than other tertiary institutions, filling 785,180 of their 1,060,919 approved admission spaces, equivalent to a 74 per cent fill rate. In contrast, polytechnics, colleges of education and other tertiary institutions filled only 34.3 per cent of their approved quotas.
The report argued that the figures challenge the widespread perception that Nigeria’s admission crisis is driven solely by inadequate capacity, noting that hundreds of thousands of approved spaces went unused.
Rather than a shortage of admission opportunities, the report identified a structural mismatch between available admission spaces and the courses, institutions and locations preferred by prospective students.
The report also highlighted inconsistencies in publicly available admissions data and called on the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) to publish privacy-protected admission statistics disaggregated by state, local government, geopolitical zone, gender, subject and institution to support evidence-based policymaking.
It further recommended that JAMB publish the evidence supporting the annual UTME cut-off marks, particularly for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM programmes, to improve transparency in the admission process.
The think tank also urged the examination body to publish an Annual Admissions and Access Report after every admission cycle, reconciling institutional admission capacity with applicant-level data to provide a clearer picture of access to higher education in Nigeria.
In addition, the report advised JAMB to conduct controlled pilot testing and independent security assessments before implementing its proposed Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiative for computer-based examinations, while expanding CBT access and candidate support across the country’s six geopolitical zones.
Although 2,243,816 candidates registered for the 2026 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), the report noted that the 2026 admission exercise was still ongoing and could not yet be directly compared with the completed 2025 admission cycle.
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