by Alexander O. Onukwue
The good news from reducing the cut-off marks of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) could be that less Nigerian students will be seeking admissions in Benin Republic, Liberia and, particularly, Ghana, where about a billion dollars have been spent by Nigerian students on tuition.
Yet, the move will also set off an alarm of suspicion to parents and individuals on the quality of educations on offer when the minimum requirement to get in is a mere quarter of the total marks.
According to surveys, the US and the UK are the top destinations for Nigerian students, the third being Ghana. Many students go for their first degrees but the vast majority enroll abroad for their postgraduate degrees. Basic requirements usually are that intending students prove their ability to communicate in English through tests of English exams (TOEFL or IELTS), with the accompanying exams, GRE for the US.
As a condition to enroll on some programmes, certain remedial courses or diplomas may be required, usually lasting a year or extra months in addition. But with Nigeria now lowering its standards to attain that first degree to even qualify for these remedial programmes, would there be a knock-on effect on prospective students who wish to gain those foreign degrees?
Not all degrees obtained from the UK and the US are of better standing than those obtained locally and it should be a concern that Nigerian students continually troop to those places as alternatives to the reasonable quality that are available at home. That said, it is still worthwhile to obtain better education from the best universities in those countries and one wonders if the weakening of the entry standards here does not make it more difficult to gain entry into those schools.
Think of it: would you be safe to host people in your marble halls if you knew that the food they had eaten before coming were from crops grown with second-rate fertilizer?
