By isqil Najim
A letter dated 15 June 2026 addressed to the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, the National Universities Commission asked JAMB to recognise the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria, COREN as the body with statutory power to set admission quotas for engineering and technology programmes across the country. This development was further confirmed at the recently concluded COREN Assembly in Abuja.
The letter, signed by Abubakar M. Girei on behalf of the Executive Secretary of the NUC, stated that COREN, “by statute, holds the authority to determine and set admission quotas for Engineering and Technology programmes across Nigerian universities.”
To understand what this means for engineering students and their universities, it helps to look first at what has already happened to students in fields where this kind of regulation has existed for a while.
An engineering graduate caught up in a quota dispute under this new structure …may find themselves unable to proceed to NYSC in the first place.
The UNILORIN’s Medical Students cases
In 2017, the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria approved a maximum admission quota of 150 students for UNILORIN’s Medicine and Surgery programme. The university admitted well over 200 students that year, and by some accounts did the same again in 2018.
Nobody paid attention to the excess until the affected students reached their final year and sat their final MBBS examinations. Last year, 194 students met the requirements for the award of the MBBS degree. Of these, 175 passed outright in one sitting, while 19 had resits, of whom 14 eventually passed, bringing the qualified number to 189 by one count, or 194 by the university’s own figure reported to Premium Times.
To conceal the extent of its quota violation, the university presented only 150 of these graduates to the MDCN for induction. The remaining 44 graduates were left stranded, unable to begin their housemanship or proceed to the National Youth Service Corps, because without induction by the MDCN, a medical graduate in Nigeria cannot practise.
When the university finally approached the MDCN, it was reminded that only 150 could be inducted, in line with the approved quota. The university was told to rank the students and present the top 150. On 14 November 2025, UNILORIN went ahead and inducted these 150 graduates. The remaining 44 were left out entirely, with no clear date for their own induction.
The affected students were left to lament their fate and lost time after spending 8 years on 6 years course. This is the essence of what a quota violation does.
Last year, the MDCN refused to induct over 300 graduates of the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Calabar, because the university had admitted students beyond its allocated quota. The matter escalated to the point that the House of Representatives, in July 2025, adopted a motion calling on the Federal Ministry of Education to conduct a forensic investigation into the crisis.
Law schools have not escaped this pattern either. In 2023, the Council for Legal Education, the regulatory body for law education in Nigeria, imposed a five year ban on the admission of students to the law faculty of Baze University, Abuja, citing a breach of strict admission rules.
The council’s approved quota for the faculty was 50 students per session. An accreditation panel led by the Director General of the Nigerian Law School, Professor Isa Chiroma, found that the university had, since 2017, admitted over 750 law students, a number that would ordinarily have taken about 15 years to admit under the approved quota. This left the Nigerian Law School with a backlog of over 347 students waiting to be admitted for their final professional training.
Quota violations in Nigerian higher education have not been isolated mistakes by one or two institutions. They have been a pattern, tolerated for years because the professional bodies responsible for catching them have often only acted after students had already graduated, when the damage was already done.
COREN’s push to control engineering admissions is not a new improvisation. It has been building for at least three years. In August 2023, the COREN President, Professor Sadiq Abubakar, announced that the council would begin indexing engineering students in schools, so that institutions could not exceed their admission quotas without detection. He explained that oath taking and induction of graduates would be made mandatory, in the same way medicine and pharmacy already operate, and that students who are not properly indexed would not be mobilised for NYSC.
In February 2025, at a Stakeholder Summit in Lagos and the inauguration of the Lagos Regional Steering Committee, Professor Abubakar, drawing on his 37 years of experience as a university administrator, lamented the persistent problem of overpopulated engineering faculties,
In June 2025, when COREN’s President led a courtesy visit to the JAMB Registrar, Professor Is haq Oloyede the matter was the core focus. Oloyede publicly endorsed COREN’s request. He praised the initiative to regulate engineering and technology enrolments similarly to the health sector. This years-long campaign culminated in the recent 2026 NUC directive solidifying COREN’s statutory authority.
Where COREN’s authority comes from
The legal foundation for COREN’s authority lies in the Engineers (Registration, etc.) Act, CAP E11, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004, as amended by the Engineers (Registration, etc.) (Amendment) Act No. 3 of 2018.
Section 1(1)(b) of the Act gives the council the function of “determining what standards of knowledge and skill are to be attained by persons seeking to become registered as engineering practitioners” and of maintaining a register of persons entitled to practise.
Section 6(1) states that a person is only entitled to full registration if he has attended a course of training approved by the council, conducted at an institution the council has approved, and holds a qualification the council has approved.
Section 9(6) goes further, requiring that “an educational institution for the training of persons in the engineering profession shall submit the syllabus of its programme, content and minimum facilities to the Council for approval before a course approved by the National Universities Commission or the National Board for Technical Education is commenced.”
Section 11(1) also empowers the council to approve courses of training intended for persons seeking to become engineering practitioners, provided such courses confer sufficient knowledge and skill for the practice of the profession.
The residency plan as a stronger leverage point
There is another part of COREN’s plan that could change the stakes considerably beyond what medicine and law regulators have been able to do. It is one year of mandatory internship immediately after graduation, before a one year NYSC placement in a relevant organisation, and then a minimum of two years of practice under the mentorship of a registered engineer, before a graduate can be considered for full registration.
As COREN explained as far back as 2023, a student who is not properly indexed will not be mobilised for NYSC at all, in exactly the same way an unindexed medical student cannot be mobilised. Once mandatory residency is added on top of indexing, COREN would hold a check on graduates at the earliest possible point, before they even reach the NYSC call up stage, rather than only at the point of professional registration years later.
For students affected by an admission quota violation, this creates a formidable wall. An engineering graduate caught up in a quota dispute under this new structure may not even get that far. Because a large number of engineering graduates actually choose not to practise engineering after their service year, this system ensures they cannot bypass COREN. Without NYSC, regardless of your degree, securing a job in Nigeria becomes exponentially harder.
What this means going forward
For years, Nigerian universities have largely decided how many students to admit into engineering programmes based on general NUC approval, sometimes without close reference to whether laboratories, workshops and staff numbers could genuinely support that intake.
COREN’s accreditation process looks specifically at those facilities. Where the two processes did not align, some students ended up earning a degree that COREN would not recognise for professional registration, a gap that is only detected at the point of seeking to practise, long after admission decisions had been made and could no longer be reversed.
The question that remains is Will Nigerian universities comply with a regulator that now has the backing of both JAMB and the NUC, and admit only as many engineering students as their facilities can genuinely train, or will some of them continue to operate as or gamble with the career of their students?
isqil Najim can be reached on Linkedin