Estimated reading time: 6 minute(s)
Fawaz Adebisi & Chidinma Uzoma
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, has, in the last five years, registered over 10million candidates, despite the high unemployment rate in Nigeria.
The JAMB, having released the number of candidates that registered this year, 1.6million, has shown that Nigerian students are ready to pursue higher education, even in the face of economic challenges.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the unemployment rate in Nigeria rose from 27.1% in the second quarter of 2020 to 33.3% in the fourth quarter of the same year.
During a research, it was gathered that in July 2021, a report released by the World Bank showed that the unemployment rate in Nigeria rose to its highest level under President Muhammadu Buhari’s regime to 42.5% for youths and 26.3% for non-youth.
According to NBS data, the total number of Nigerians with at least Ordinary National Diploma are 12,329,987(12.3 million) out of which 4,394,550(4.39 million) are currently jobless.
Breakdown shows that in the labour market, 5,779,243(5.77 million) are with NCE/OND/Nursing certificates, out of which 1,849,984(1.84 million) number are currently jobless
The same reality goes also for 5,940,546 (5.9 million) in the labour market with BA/BSc/HND degrees out of the number 2,382,052(2.3 million) are out of work.
Despite this, JAMB announced in 2018 that it registered 1,502,978 candidates, who sat for the 2018 UTME.
Also, in 2019, JAMB registered over 1.8 million candidates for the exam, while in 2020, over 1.9 million candidates registered for the exam, making it the highest number of registration done in the history of the board.
However, there was a drop in 2021, having only 1.4 million candidates who wrote the UTME, compared to the previous year’s almost 2 million candidates, as 1,837,011 candidates were successfully captured in 2022.
Meanwhile, PLATFORM TIMES gathered that only 378,639 of the 1,761,338 who sat for last year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations scored 200 and above.
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s)
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