Minister to NASS: Stop approving new varsities, make existing institutions better

The Minister of Education, Dr Maruf Alausa, has asked members of the National Assembly to put an end to the approval of new universities in the country.

Alausa said the lawmakers should rather focus on how existing universities would be better equipped to offer quality learning with the view of producing competent graduates.

The minister made the call while fielding questions from newsmen as a guest at the 2025 Ministerial Press Briefing series in Abuja on Thursday, March 13, 2025.

Alausa who decried the unprofitable outcome of having too many universities come up, especially at the federal level, urged the lawmakers to be more sensitive in their clamour, adding that proliferation of universities was not the only proof to show legislators were carrying out their constitutional mandates.

The minister said: “I want to use this opportunity to talk to our legislators, members of the National Assemblies. Please, we need to stop this floodgate. There’s so much pressure on the president. We have to at least be sensitive to him as well.

“They’re passing a lot of bills. Today, I can tell you there are almost 200 bills in the National Assembly for new universities to open. We can’t continue this. Even the ones we have, we don’t have enough infrastructures there. The capacity for a university to admit is not there.

“What we need to do now is to rebuild the capacities to ensure that we can offer more viable courses to our citizens.

“We have about 64 federal universities, 68 state universities, and 138 private universities. If you put the entire enrollment together, and the 138 private universities account for just about 7.5% of total undergraduate enrollment.

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“Even in our 64 federal universities, the total number of undergraduate enrollment today is just about 875,000, which is abysmally low. We have universities with less than 1,000 admission of students, undergraduate students and there’s this intense clamor for more universities to be open. We have to stop that.

“We have a clear plan; the president has given tentative approval. We’re working on the document, on the fact memo to address that because you’re talking about inadequate take-off grant.

“Those take-off grant is dependent on the numbers of federal and state universities that we have. The grant amount is a numerator, and the number of universities is a denominator. As the denominator increases, the X number, which is equal to the grant, reduces and that’s why we have to stop this deluge of just opening universities.

“I understand the sentiment of our legislators. They want to show that they’re working. We know they’re working but then, we have enough assets, we have enough opportunities out there for students to go to universities.

“What we now need to do is now to begin to mobilise more resources to develop infrastructures, build engineering workshops, build laboratories in these universities, recruit international standard teachers, so that we can begin to get these universities to develop, to deliver high quality of education that will be known for as a country.”

Alausa further revealed that the government has put some measures in place to equip and empower Almajiri children with learning skills such as conditional money transfers, school feeding programme, and vocational training programmes.

The Star