Federal Government Orders National Ranking of All Tertiary Institutions

Universities, polytechnics and colleges of education brought under compulsory assessment as Alausa says new framework will drive quality, accountability and global competitiveness

By Abdullahi Yusuf

The Federal Government has made participation in Nigeria’s national tertiary education ranking exercise compulsory for all universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, expanding the assessment beyond universities in a move aimed at measuring institutional performance across the sector.

The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, announced the policy on Tuesday in Abuja during a meeting with the Nigerian Universities Ranking Advisory Committee (NURAC), which has now been expanded and renamed the Nigerian Tertiary Education Ranking Advisory Committee to reflect its wider mandate.

Alausa said the unified ranking framework would strengthen quality, accountability, institutional performance and the global competitiveness of Nigeria’s tertiary education system.

He said the exercise would give institutions measurable benchmarks for assessing their performance, identifying weaknesses and tracking improvements, while encouraging healthy competition among institutions.

Under the new arrangement, universities, polytechnics and colleges of education will come under the national ranking framework, with participation required across the tertiary education system.

The minister said the 2026/2027 ranking exercise for universities would commence in September, while the reconstituted committee would determine when polytechnics and colleges of education would be incorporated into the exercise.

Alausa said the Federal Government would develop guidelines to institutionalise the ranking system and formally communicate the mandatory requirement to vice-chancellors and heads of other tertiary institutions.

He added that the exercise would be funded by the government through the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund).

The minister said the policy formed part of the education reforms of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration under the Renewed Hope Agenda and the Nigeria Education Sector Renewal Initiative.

He also pledged that the Federal Ministry of Education would provide policy direction, funding and capacity-building support to ensure that the ranking exercise remained credible, sustainable and effective.

According to Alausa, the ministry would work with the ranking committee to organise in-service training and institutional capacity-building programmes to help tertiary institutions identify weaknesses, improve their performance and strengthen their prospects of gaining international recognition.

The Minister of State for Education, Prof. Suwaiba Ahmad, described the expansion as a major step towards improving accountability and quality across Nigeria’s tertiary education system.

Ahmad said healthy competition would encourage institutions to assess their performance, identify gaps and continuously improve their academic and administrative standards.

She stressed that both public and private tertiary institutions should be covered by the exercise, arguing that a comprehensive ranking framework would provide a mechanism for establishing and maintaining minimum standards across the sector.

The ranking, she said, would also allow institutions to understand their strengths and weaknesses and use the findings to achieve measurable improvements.

Chairman of the ranking advisory committee and former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, Emeritus Prof. Peter Okebukola, said the committee’s engagement with Alausa followed a memorandum congratulating the Federal Government over the growing number of Nigerian universities making progress in international rankings.

The committee had also called for increased investment in university education to consolidate the gains recorded by Nigerian institutions.

Okebukola said the minister went beyond the committee’s initial proposal by extending the ranking exercise to polytechnics and colleges of education.

The expansion necessitated the transformation of NURAC into the Nigerian Tertiary Education Ranking Advisory Committee.

He expressed optimism that sustained investment, stronger institutional capacity and the new national ranking framework would enable more Nigerian tertiary institutions to improve their positions in international rankings and compete more effectively with leading institutions globally.

Nigeria’s universities have in recent years faced increasing pressure to improve their positions in global rankings, where institutions are assessed using measures that can include research output, citations, academic reputation, international outlook and available resources.

But inadequate funding, limited research capacity, infrastructure deficits, staffing challenges and other institutional constraints have continued to affect the ability of many Nigerian institutions to compete with better-funded universities internationally.

The decision to extend the national ranking exercise to polytechnics and colleges of education therefore broadens the government’s attempt to establish common measures of institutional performance across the tertiary education system.

The immediate test will be whether the new framework can move beyond producing rankings to helping institutions identify weaknesses, improve standards and translate competition into measurable gains in the quality of education.

That will ultimately determine whether the compulsory exercise becomes another institutional scorecard or a mechanism capable of changing how Nigeria’s tertiary institutions measure and improve themselves.

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