NUC makes moves to rank Nigerian varsities
The Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, Prof Julius Okojie, has said that Nigerian universities will soon be ranked according to their standard to help Nigerians choose between highly graded and lowly graded institutions.
In an exclusive interview with our correspondent, Okojie said the NUC had begun plans to accredit Nigerian universities with a view to grouping and ranking them as being practised in other developed parts of the world.
Known as institutional accreditation, the NUC boss said this would further enhance quality and efficiency in the nation’s ivory towers.
According to him, criteria such as facilities, lecturer-student ratio, funding as well as the impact of the universities on their host communities will form part of the yardsticks of identifying and grouping the universities.
He said, subsequently, the list of the approved institutions would be posted on the NUC web portal to enable the members of the public to easily access the information.
He added that the development would also help parents and guardians to choose the kind of universities they wanted for their children and wards.
He said, “With institutional accreditation in place, you can check the portal of the NUC for the list of accredited universities in Nigeria. It will also show the list of the non-accredited ones.”
Okojie explained that funding of public institutions would be dependent on their success in the institutional accreditation exercise.
According to him, the NUC will send a memo through the Ministry of Education to the Federal Executive Council to ensure that any public institution that fails the accreditation exercise is not funded or allowed to have new programmes.
He said, “They will not have new entrance list system, it’s only programmes that are good enough that we are going to fund, we will tell them to do self-examination and rationalise programmes.
“What the American government does is what they call professional accreditation programme.
“The American government does not give scholarship to any student of any institution that failed accreditation.”
He explained that grading and ranking involved grouping. Okojie said, “When you say Ivy-League schools, you are giving a quality to a higher institution. Institutions like Yale and Harvard are among the top 20 in the world.
When you group universities together, you are saying given all said and done, all these universities are equally good. In ranking, you are now saying from these parameters, the number of quality lecturers, research output, this is the number one university in Nigeria. ’’
“So for programme accreditation, we will include additional criteria. I am talking about funding, the lecturers’ perception of their graduates and so on. We want to know what impact the universities have had on their communities. We will be taking all the programmes in that university as a whole.”
To further add value to the certificates being issued by the Nigerian universities, he said the NUC was planning to put in place a form of security system for every certificate issued to prevent forgery.
“For every certificate issued, there will be a chip, an implantation chip.
“We will also put the graduates’ data in our database like the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board does,’’ he said.
Re: NUC makes moves to rank Nigerian varsities
