Below is Daud Olatunji
The Federal Government has made participation in the national tertiary education ranking exercise compulsory for all universities, polytechnics and colleges of education in Nigeria.
The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, announced the policy on Tuesday in Abuja during a meeting with the Nigerian Universities Ranking Advisory Committee.
The committee has consequently been expanded and renamed the Nigerian Tertiary Education Ranking Advisory Committee to reflect its broader mandate.
Alausa said the unified ranking framework was aimed at strengthening quality, accountability, institutional performance and the global competitiveness of Nigeria’s tertiary education system.
According to him, the ranking will provide institutions with measurable benchmarks for assessing their performance, identifying areas of weakness and tracking improvements.
He said the exercise would also promote healthy competition among institutions and encourage them to improve the quality of education they provide.
The minister disclosed that the 2026/2027 ranking exercise for universities would commence in September, while the reconstituted committee would determine when polytechnics and colleges of education would be brought into the exercise.
Alausa said the Federal Government would develop guidelines to institutionalise the ranking system and formally communicate to vice-chancellors and heads of other tertiary institutions that participation was mandatory.
He added that the exercise would be funded by the government through the Tertiary Education Trust Fund.
The minister said the policy was part of the education reforms of the President Bola Tinubu administration under the Renewed Hope Agenda and the Nigeria Education Sector Renewal Initiative.
He also pledged that the Federal Ministry of Education would provide policy direction, funding and capacity-building support to ensure that the ranking exercise was credible, sustainable and effective.
Alausa said the ministry would work with the ranking committee to organise in-service training and institutional capacity-building programmes to enable more Nigerian tertiary institutions to improve their performance and gain international recognition.
The Minister of State for Education, Prof. Suwaiba Ahmad, described the initiative as a major step towards improving accountability and quality across the tertiary education sector.
Ahmad said healthy competition would compel institutions to assess their performance, identify gaps and consistently improve their academic and administrative standards.
She stressed that both public and private tertiary institutions should be covered by the exercise, arguing that the ranking would provide a mechanism for establishing and maintaining minimum standards across the sector.
She said the exercise would enable institutions to understand their strengths and weaknesses and use the findings to achieve measurable improvements.
Chairman of the ranking advisory committee and former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, Emeritus Prof. Peter Okebukola, said the committee’s engagement with the minister followed a memorandum congratulating the Federal Government over the growing number of Nigerian universities making progress in global rankings.
Okebukola said the committee had also called for increased investment in university education to consolidate the gains recorded by Nigerian institutions.
He, however, noted that the minister went beyond the committee’s initial proposal by expanding the ranking exercise to polytechnics and colleges of education.
The development, he said, necessitated the transformation of the Nigerian Universities Ranking Advisory Committee into the Nigerian Tertiary Education Ranking Advisory Committee.
Okebukola expressed optimism that sustained investment, stronger institutional capacity and the new national ranking framework would help more Nigerian tertiary institutions improve their positions in international rankings.
Nigerian universities have in recent years faced growing pressure to improve their standing in global rankings, which typically consider factors including research output, academic reputation, citations, international outlook and institutional resources.
However, inadequate funding, weak research capacity, infrastructure deficits, staffing challenges and limited institutional resources have continued to affect the ability of many Nigerian tertiary institutions to compete with better-funded institutions globally.
The expansion of the national ranking exercise to polytechnics and colleges of education is expected to create a broader system for measuring institutional performance across Nigeria’s tertiary education sector.
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