- By TopNews
Nigeria’s tertiary education system left more than 706,000 approved admission spaces vacant in 2025, even as thousands of young Nigerians struggled to secure places in higher institutions, a new policy report has revealed.
The figure has raised fresh questions about the country’s admission system, particularly whether Nigeria’s challenge is simply a shortage of spaces or a deeper mismatch between available places and what prospective students can access, qualify for or are willing to accept.
According to a report by the iRead To Live Initiative, 1,009,736 of the 1,716,154 admission spaces approved across Nigerian tertiary institutions were filled during the 2025 admission cycle.
This left 706,418 approved places unused, representing an overall utilisation rate of 58.8 per cent.
Universities recorded the highest level of utilisation, filling 785,180 of their 1,060,919 approved admission spaces, or 74 per cent.
However, the situation was markedly different across polytechnics, colleges of education and other tertiary institutions, which collectively filled only 34.3 per cent of their approved spaces.
The findings were contained in a report titled “The Admissions Gap: Who Gets into Nigeria’s Tertiary Institutions, and Why It Matters.”
The initiative said the figures exposed a major contradiction in Nigeria’s admission debate, where public attention often centres on candidates unable to secure admission despite the existence of hundreds of thousands of unused spaces.
The report stated:
“All institutions: 58.8 per cent; universities only: 74 per cent; other institutions: 34.3 per cent. 1,009,736 of 1,716,154 approved places were filled nationally in 2025, leaving 706,418 unfilled. Polytechnics and colleges of education filled only about a third of their approved places.”
It added:
“Within degree-awarding universities specifically, the fill rate was considerably higher: 785,180 of 1,060,919 approved places filled, with 275,739 left empty. Put simply, Nigeria’s tertiary institutions did not run out of room in 2025.”
According to the report, the unused capacity raises a fundamental question about the nature of Nigeria’s admission problem.
“Hundreds of thousands of approved seats went unused even as public conversation focused on candidates who could not gain a place at all,” the initiative stated.
Rather than attributing the situation solely to inadequate institutional capacity, the group linked the low utilisation of admission spaces to a structural mismatch between where spaces are available and what prospective students want, qualify for or can realistically access.
The report argued that factors such as location, choice of institution, available courses and entry requirements could be contributing to the wide disparity in admission utilisation.
It therefore called for more detailed information from the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board to establish exactly where and why the gaps occur.
The initiative urged JAMB to publish privacy-protected admission and performance data broken down by state, local government area, geopolitical zone, gender, subject and institution.
It said such information would help policymakers and researchers identify areas where admission opportunities were concentrated and where access remained limited.
“JAMB already collects most of this information to administer registration and admissions, and publishing it responsibly would let government, universities, and independent researchers see where access gaps are concentrated,” the group said.
JAMB Asked To Explain UTME Cut-Off Decisions
The initiative also challenged JAMB to make the basis for the national UTME cut-off mark more transparent.
It called on the examination body to publish the evidence and data used in arriving at the collectively agreed cut-off mark, arguing that Nigerians should be able to understand how such an important admission benchmark is determined.
“The evidence behind that collective decision should be public,” the report stated.
The group said greater transparency would also help the public understand the reasoning behind admission policies and national priorities, particularly the balance between science, technology, engineering and mathematics programmes and non-STEM courses.
It further recommended that JAMB publish an annual Admissions and Access Report after every admission cycle.
Such a report, it said, should bring together applicant-level admission information and institutional capacity figures while providing consistent year-on-year statistics.
“JAMB should publish this report after each admission cycle, reconciling applicant-level admission data with capacity-utilisation data and presenting consistent year-on-year tables, so the same cycle is not read two different ways depending on which JAMB dataset a reader consults,” the initiative stated.
