The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has said that it is not within its purview to address the claims of non-mobilisation of some Higher National Diploma (HND) students for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).
JAMB Registrar, Ishaq Oloyede, disclosed this on Friday at a meeting with the leadership the National Association of Polytechnic Students (NAPS) which had accused JAMB of being responsible for the student’s predicament.
Oloyede told them to direct their grievances regarding the non-mobilisation of some HND graduates for the National Youth Service Corps to the appropriate authorities.
He clarified that the Board does not oversee the admission of HND students and as such has no role in their mobilisation for the NYSC.
He wondered why JAMB was being targeted by the association on the issue, describing the action as born out from sheer ignorance of the mandate of the Board.
He explained that JAMB’s mandate is limited to conducting examinations for admission into universities, national diploma (ND), and Nigerian Certificate in Education (NCE) programmes, not HND programmes.
“We admit students for ND programmes. Once you graduate and seek HND admission, JAMB has no further role. HND admissions are conducted by individual institutions,” he added.
Oloyede also addressed concerns over part-time polytechnic programmes, stating that his criticism was only directed at “Daily Part-Time” schemes designed to exploit students.
He also blamed some of the challenges of affected students to institutions that admit more than the capacity specified by the NBTE.
“NBTE asks them to admit 100 students for instance, they will take that 100 and register them for full time ND. They will take another 1000 and they will be teaching them in the same class and will say those ones are part-time.,” he said.
He also disclosed that there was a challenge of correlation between the ND which the students have acquired and the HND which in most cases are acquired in different institutions.
He advised NAPS to thoroughly investigate the problem to uncover the root causes and solutions.
