The Flip Side Of Age Benchmark For University Admissions

Some days back, the Honourable minister in charge of Education in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Prof. Tahir Mamman, expressed concerns over the number of young people sitting for entrance examinations into Nigerian universities. In the words of the revered professor of law, "The minimum age of entry into the university is 18, but we have seen students who are 15, 16 years going in for the entrance examination. Parents should be encouraged not to push their wards too much. Mostly, it is the pressure of parents that is causing this.

“We are going to look at this development because the candidates are too young to understand what the whole university education is all about. This is the period when children migrate from controlled to uncontrolled environment; when they are in charge of their own affairs. But, if they are too young, they won’t be able to manage properly. I think that is part of what we are seeing in the Universities today.”

There is no gainsaying that the concern of the minister is genuine to the extent that it harps on the importance of leaner readiness in effective curriculum implementation. Without equivocation, learner readiness places serious emphasis on the necessity of maturation in stages of biological and mental development to enable the pupils or students cope with the level of classroom instruction. Curriculum implementation is a chain of intentional activities including classroom interactions; and all are aimed at achieving proper development of the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains of the learners to make them functional members of the society.

Traditionally, maturation was assumed to come in a chronological order where the first in age matures first in time. This now moribund template was used to fix age-limits for the different tiers of our school system which includes primary, secondary and tertiary. In demonstration of their obvious conviction that maturation is attained by age, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, threw her weight behind the intention of the minister of education to reinvigorate the enforcement of the 18 years age-limit for university admissions in Nigeria. Speaking in support of the idea, the National President of ASUU, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, had this to say:

"We are in full support. It is the right thing. What the minister said is the correct thing. The issue of age benchmark is not a new thing. 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 age 12; and then by the time you get to secondary school you spend six years and then you graduate by 18".

Prof. Osodeke, nay the Academic Staff Union of Universities, was right in the account of the historical background of the age-limit or benchmark for university education in Nigeria but their is more to the development of the education system of any given nation than history. This is enough to say that the blanket support given to the 18 years age-limit or benchmark for university admissions by Academic Staff Union of Universities without considerations for modern developments arising from the dynamics of the global society needs an urgent review. The age benchmark on university admissions, and even admissions into primary and secondary schools, belongs to the analog era. The entire globe, including Nigeria, has gone digital with factors that fasttrack the maturation of young people, animals and plants. Due to the impact of digitalisation, we have seen, in recent times, teenagers hold the fort in areas which used to be the exclusive preserves of the old. In countries like Israel, China, etc, the security, IT, industrial and economic sectors have been positively revolutionized with guaranteed sustainability by young people in those countries. ASUU should not put herself forward as a promoter of gerontocracy. The future of Nigerian whiz kids should not be sacrificed on the alter of age benchmark which the rest of the world has moved away from.

For the Nigeria Parents Forum which is noted in Nigeria for her interests in positive parenting, the policy of age benchmark for university admissions should be approached with a balanced mindset. According to Nigeria Parents Forum, "Nigeria Parents Forum is mindful of the importance of learner readiness in successful curriculum implementation and shall back the 18 years age limit with a caveat that the development of gifted children or children who have demonstrated capacity to cope should not be held back with the age-limit rule.

"Again, the drivers of the National Policy on Education should not single out university admission for age benchmark. If age benchmark has become very important in our education system, it should be set for admissions into primary and secondary schools.

"Above all, the ministry of education should do a comparative analysis of what is obtainable in the educational settings of other countries before teeing off the reinvention of this moribund policy. For instance, a few years back, a young boy passed the Nigerian universities examination but was denied admission because of his age. Universities in Ghana, UK, USA and other parts of the world offered the boy university admissions with mouth-watering scholarships. That was sufficient prove that capacity benchmark for university admissions is the global best practice. The forum would rather encourage the Honourable minister to tackle the infrastructural decay, dearth of instructors and other critical challenges facing the education sector in Nigeria.