K BOLANLE ATI-JOHN urges the country to move from establishing university as status to education as capability There is much in the federal government’s emerging education reform agenda that deserves acknowledgement. The renewed emphasis on technical and vocational education, Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM), student financing, education data, innovation and quality assurance reflects an important recognition by the Tinubu administration: Nigeria’s education system cannot remain detached from the economic, technological and demographic realities reshaping the country. Perhaps even more significant was government’s decision last year to halt the proliferation of new tertiary institutions. The reasons were sobering. Education Minister Tunji Alausa disclosed that 199 universities received fewer than 100 applications through JAMB in the preceding admission cycle, while 34 received none. In one federal university, he said, roughly 1,200 staff serve fewer than 800 students. Government was confronting an uncomfortable truth: multiplying institutions is not necessarily the same thing as expanding meaningful educational opportunity. It is precisely because these reforms point in the right direction that the moment invites a deeper question: what should determine whether Nigeria needs another university? That question has acquired fresh relevance following President Bola Tinubu’s approval, in July 2026, of the conversion of the Federal Polytechnic, Nasarawa, into the Federal University of Mining, Engineering and Technology. There is considerable strategic logic behind the decision. Nasarawa sits within an important mineral belt, and Nigeria urgently needs expertise in mining, mineral processing, metallurgy, manufacturing and engineering if we are serious about moving from extracting minerals to creating value from them. The Presidency explicitly connected the institution to industrialisation and the country’s solid-minerals potential. The issue, therefore, is not whether Nigeria needs mining capability. It unquestionably does. The more consequential question is whether creating or converting a university should automatically be the preferred instrument for producing every capability the country requires. Nigeria now has more than 300 universities across federal, state and private ownership. Yet a country approaching a quarter of a billion people, with an overwhelmingly young population, cannot reasonably be told that it has too much higher education. Millions more Nigerians will require post-secondary opportunities in the decades ahead. Here lies the paradox: Nigeria can simultaneously have too little tertiary capacity for its population and too many poorly differentiated institutions competing for limited professors, laboratories, research funding and students. Our problem, then, is not fundamentally how many universities we have. It is that we have gradually confused the multiplication of institutions with the accumulation of capability. A University Is Not a Signboard A university does not become a serious university merely because legislation establishes it and buildings carry its name. A university represents accumulated intellectual capital: professors, laboratories, libraries, doctoral programmes, research traditions, international networks, industry relationships and generations of scholarship. Those things cannot be created by proclamation. They are accumulated painstakingly over decades. More importantly, not every national skills requirement needs a university. Consider mining. A modern mining industry certainly requires geologists, metallurgists, mining engineers and researchers. But it also requires drill technicians, surveyors, mineral-processing technologists, electricians, welders, heavy-equipment specialists, instrumentation technicians, plant operators and maintenance professionals. Who will train them? If every strategic skills shortage eventually produces another university, Nigeria risks developing an education system increasingly rich in degree-awarding institutions but poor in the technical depth required to industrialise. And beneath that institutional problem lies something even harder to reform: perception. For decades, we have constructed an educational status hierarchy in which the university degree sits at the summit, the polytechnic below it, and technical and vocational education somewhere further down. Parents absorb it. Students absorb it. Employers reinforce it. Government, sometimes inadvertently, validates it. That hierarchy has consequences. When a polytechnic becomes successful, its apparent next step is often to become a university. But why? Perhaps a successful polytechnic does not need to become a univers
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