The Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, stirred up a hornets’ nest recently when he announced that the Federal Government would consider pegging the minimum age for admission into the universities and other tertiary institutions in the country at 18. He was inspecting a CTB centre in Abuja during the last Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and saw 15,16 year-olds going for the examination.
He believed they were too young to be admitted into the universities because most of the challenges at the universities today are, according to him, caused by underage students.
“The other thing which we noticed,” the minister was quoted as saying in an interaction with newsmen, “is the age of those who applied to go to the universities. Some of them are too young. We are going to look at it because they are too young to understand what university education is all about.
“That is the stage when students migrate from a controlled environment to where they are in charge of their affairs. So, if they are too young, they won’t be able to manage properly. That accounts for some of the problems we are seeing in the universities.
“We are going to look at that; 18 is the entry age for university, but we see students, 15 or 16, going into the examination. It is not good for us. Parents should be encouraged not to push their wards and children too much.”
The minister might have inadvertently touched off controversy over a sensitive issue. For one, the current average admission age is 16. Most universities advertise it as such during the admission process. The government would be upsetting the apple cart if it goes ahead to upstage that arrangement that has been run smoothly for decades.
It will, indeed, be oddly to abruptly stop the age requirement at the level of university admission. It will be akin to mauling a snake in the middle because the current age issue takes its bearing from the elementary school enrollment. So, any attempt to tinker with this arrangement should begin with a review of the age bracket that the children now start elementary school.
Most pupils today begin elementary education at the average age of four to five years (after a spell at the pre-primary levels- crèche, kindergarten and nursery). They then spend an average of five years in the primary school (since most pupils now write the common entrance examination at Primary Five) and six years through the junior and senior secondary schools.
So, by the time they are writing the senior secondary school certificate examination (SSSCE) and UTME, they are averagely 15 and 16 years. They will be about 16 and 17 by the time they resume at the university. Some students, however, finish earlier in exceptional cases.
Most parents relish this arrangement for three reasons. First, survival drudgeries take most parents away from home from morning till late in the night, many times including weekends. So, enrolling their children and wards for schooling almost from cradle conveniently relieves them of the burden or bother of fending for those children were they to remain at home.
Second, most parents also crave early education for their children and wards so they could be rid of the burden of paying their school fees before retirement. Third, they want their children and wards to graduate as early as possible to beat the age limits now being set by modern-day employers for gainful employment.
These account for why the fiercest and most vociferous opposition to the minister’s pronouncement came from the parents. The National Parents-Teachers Association of Nigeria (NAPTAN), for example, testily declared their members’ total opposition to pegging the minimum age for university admission at 18, as the minister had hinted.
“Parents are totally against it,” NAPTAN’s Deputy National President, Chief Adeolu Ogunbanjo, declared almost tetchily, adding: “In fact, the youngest professor in the world is nine years old! Some pupils do UTME at age 14 or 15; we are still managing that. Now, he (minister) is saying 18.
“It is not ideal at all. It will confuse the system. When a child passes UTME at age 15 or 16, it means such cannot enter the university? That would mean a two-year wait or waste. Why should the minister think of such without engaging the relevant stakeholders in the sector? He should have engaged all the stakeholders before the pronouncement. Some people do have double promotion, what becomes of them?
“Some are brilliant and talented. So, do we delay them unnecessarily? Waiting two extra years could discourage a child. The minister should just leave it at 16. It is still manageable.”
Some other parents acting on the platform of the Campaign Against Injustice (CAI) even want the current age limit of 16 reduced further for exceptionally brilliant students. They believe denying brilliant candidates below 16 university admission is a “retrogressive measure.”
The Coordinator for CAI, Mrs. Oladunni Babalola, pleads with the authorities to give students who perform exceptionally and are below 16 a waiver. She believes using age limit to momentarily halt academic momentum is not good for the nation and individuals.
“I think the law in place (the current practice) states that you have to be 16 years before you are allowed into the university. But I think there should be an exception to every rule, particularly for exceptionally brilliant students,” she canvases.
However, most university unions agree with the minister that the minimum admission age should be 18. The President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, said the policy is a welcome development. “We are in full support,” he said, adding: “It is the right thing. What the minister said is the correct thing.”
“The issue of age benchmark is not a new thing,” the ASUU boss continued, “it’s just that regulators have not been doing their work. In those days, you could not go to primary school if you were not six years old. Then you spend six years and finish at the age of 12; and then by the time you get to secondary school, you spend six years and then graduate by 18. So, before a student could get to university, he would have been 18 years old, just as it is being done in other civilized societies.
“But when private institutions came in, they threw that laid down procedure aside, thereby a 12-year-old is seen in the university. No matter how brilliant, what can a 12-year-old know in terms of discipline and maturity? They may graduate with excellent results but the needed discipline that is associated with maturity is lacking in most of them. This retracing of our steps to 18 years minimum will help instill discipline into our youths.”
The Non- Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) also backs the policy. “18 is the year of maturity,” NASU’s General Secretary, Comrade Peter Adeyemi, said. “To be a university student,” he told a national daily, “you need some level of maturity and ability to understand life. I think 18 is okay, if they will adhere to it.”
The intervention of the Senate has, however, tended to halt the debate over the issue. The upper chamber of the National Assembly said the current age requirement of 16 will remain in place until the National Assembly conducts a legislative review of the existing law relating to the issue.
The Senate spokesman, who is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Adeyemi Adaramodu, made the clarification recently. He emphasized that the remarks on raising the minimum age requirement to 18 are personal opinions, adding that any proposed change must pass through appropriate legislative channels.
“Comments on the minimum age requirement for admission are not a law,” the Senate spokesman said. “So, it is just an opinion. It is not law. By the time the Senate resumes, whoever wants to bring that one out to make it a law will now bring it and then the procedures will take place.
“You can bring whatever to the floor in form of a bill. When you bring it, there’s going to be a public hearing. All the stakeholders- the parents, teachers, legislators, civil society organizations and even foreign organizations- will sit down and talk about it.
“We will sit down and talk. Even if they say that the minimum age should be 30 or 12, we will all discuss it at an open forum. So, it’s still a comment which cannot be taken to be the law.”
Good talk. A legislative approach involving a public hearing is the road to travel on this matter because it will give room for all the stakeholders in the sector to ventilate the issue thoroughly and arrive at the most acceptable age requirement.
For us, however, 16 years remain appropriate for admission into tertiary institutions because we believe that by reason of globalization-cum- internet revolution and the rapid physiological development of the average modern-day children, that age is not too young to cope both with the academic rigour and acceptable moral probity required to successfully pass through the university.
The minister believes underage students are the cause of the challenges at the universities. He did not elucidate that assertion as the reporters, maybe because of time factor, did not ask follow-up questions, but one of the most endemic problems most universities contend with today is sex or money for marks scandal.
It works in two subterranean ways. The first involves randy lecturers harassing female students to satisfy purely lewd desires. Many such irresponsible lecturers are constantly being given the boot in many universities over this as the cases arise.
The second is when lazy and obviously morally depraved female students themselves seduce their lecturers with either sex or money in exchange for marks. The other common and ag- long challenge that bedevils most universities is cultism.
Whether sex-cum- money for marks or cultism, there is no empirical indication that they have anything to do with age. We believe it is not a question of age but a matter of individual students’ upbringing.
In other words, while a 20-year-old from a morally depraved background could be given to lascivious indulgences, a well brought up 16-year-old could maintain a chaste disposition under the same circumstances or environment.
Besides, it is odious to make a 16-year-old who has finished secondary school and passed his or her UTME wait for another two years before he or she could go to university simply on account age! What will a female student in that situation, for example, be doing at home for two years waiting for admission?
It is a highly emotive moral question. Are we not going to inadvertently create a bigger incubus in our attempt to unravel a lesser puzzle? Let 16 years remain the age limit for admission into tertiary institutions.
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