The Federal Government has directed all universities, polytechnics and colleges of education in Nigeria to participate in the national tertiary education ranking exercise as part of efforts to improve institutional performance and raise the quality of the country’s education system.
The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, disclosed this on Tuesday in Abuja during a meeting with the Nigerian Universities Ranking Advisory Committee, NURAC.
The committee has now been expanded and renamed the Nigerian Tertiary Education Ranking Advisory Committee to reflect its broader mandate.
Alausa said the new ranking framework would promote quality, accountability, institutional performance and global competitiveness across Nigeria’s tertiary education sector.
According to him, the ranking will provide institutions with clear benchmarks for evaluating their performance, identifying weaknesses and measuring improvements over time.
He said the 2026/2027 ranking exercise for universities would begin in September, while the newly constituted committee would determine when polytechnics and colleges of education would be incorporated.
“The government would develop guidelines to institutionalise the exercise and formally communicate to vice-chancellancellors and heads of other tertiary institutions that participation was compulsory,” the minister said.
The Federal Government is expected to finance the ranking exercise through the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund.
Alausa said the policy formed part of President Bola Tinubu’s education reforms under the Renewed Hope Agenda and the Nigeria Education Sector Renewal Initiative.
He also pledged the ministry’s support through policy direction, funding and capacity-building to ensure the ranking system remained credible, sustainable and effective.
The minister said the government would work with the committee to provide in-service training and institutional capacity-building programmes to enable tertiary institutions improve their performance.
The Minister of State for Education, Professor Suwaiba Ahmad, described the initiative as an important step towards strengthening accountability and quality within the sector.
She said competition among institutions would encourage them to identify gaps in their operations and take steps to improve the quality of education they provide.
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Suwaiba further advocated the inclusion of both public and private institutions, saying the ranking would help establish and maintain minimum standards across Nigeria’s tertiary education system.
Chairman of the advisory committee and former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, Emeritus Professor Peter Okebukola, said the committee initially approached the minister to commend the government over the increasing number of Nigerian universities appearing in global rankings.
He said the committee had also called for increased investment in university education to sustain the progress.
However, Okebukola said the minister expanded the proposal by extending the committee’s mandate beyond universities to include polytechnics and colleges of education.
He expressed optimism that increased funding, stronger institutional capacity and the new ranking framework would enable more Nigerian tertiary institutions to improve their positions in international rankings.
The development comes amid concerns over the ability of Nigerian tertiary institutions to compete globally due to challenges including inadequate funding, weak research capacity, infrastructure deficits and staffing constraints.
The new framework is expected to create a unified system for measuring institutional performance across universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
With participation now compulsory, institutions will be expected to submit relevant data and assess themselves against nationally established performance benchmarks.
