By Isqil Najim
The National Universities Commission (NUC) has formally asked the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (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 in Nigerian universities.
In a letter dated 15 June 2026 and addressed to the Registrar of JAMB, the NUC said the request follows a roundtable discussion held on 11 September 2025, where the Commission met with professional regulatory bodies and Directors of Academic Planning from universities across the country to look at how accreditation processes could be better harmonised.
The letter, signed by Abubakar M. Girei, Director of Academic Planning, on behalf of the Executive Secretary, states that the Commission wishes to “particularly draw JAMB’s attention to the standardization of functions to support professional bodies in delivering their mandate.”
It goes on to say that COREN, “by statute, holds the authority to determine and set admission quotas for Engineering and Technology programmes across Nigerian universities,” describing this as “central to the proper regulation and quality assurance of engineering education in Nigeria.”
The NUC further asked that COREN “be extended the necessary cooperation and institutional support to align, where applicable, with JAMB’s policies on admissions into Engineering and Technology programmes.”
For years, universities have largely determined how many students to admit into engineering programmes based on general NUC approval, sometimes without close reference to whether their laboratories, workshops and staff numbers could actually support that intake.
COREN, which is the body responsible for licensing engineers to practise professionally, has its own accreditation process that looks specifically at those facilities. When the two processes did not align, some students found themselves earning a degree that COREN would not recognise for professional registration.
This letter is an attempt to close that gap at the point of entry, before students are even admitted, rather than after they graduate.
Part of a wider pattern
This is not an isolated move. COREN has, in recent years, been pushing to tighten its grip on how many engineering students Nigerian universities can take in, using facility and staffing capacity as the yardstick, a model that mirrors what the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria has long done with medical school admissions.[1] In medicine, quotas tied to teaching hospital capacity and staff ratios have existed for decades, with universities occasionally clashing with the regulator over numbers.
COREN’s current push suggests engineering education in Nigeria may be moving toward a similar, tightly capped model, where the number of students an institution can admit is dictated less by demand and more by what the regulator determines the institution can properly train.
The 15 June letter follows the NUC’s Roundtable Discussion on Multiple Accreditation, held in September 2025, which brought together the Commission, professional bodies and university academic planning directors to address what had become a recurring source of friction: universities having to satisfy multiple, sometimes conflicting, sets of regulatory requirements for the same programmes.
A copy of the letter was also sent to the Registrar of COREN.
Neither JAMB nor COREN had issued a public response to the letter as of the time of this report.
