The Federal Government has made participation in the national tertiary education ranking exercise compulsory for all universities, polytechnics and colleges of education in Nigeria.
The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, announced the policy on Tuesday in Abuja during a meeting with the Nigerian Universities Ranking Advisory Committee, which has now been expanded and renamed the Nigerian Tertiary Education Ranking Advisory Committee.
Alausa said the expanded ranking framework was aimed at improving quality, accountability, institutional performance and global competitiveness across Nigeria’s tertiary education sector.
He said the exercise would provide institutions with clear benchmarks for evaluating their performance, identifying areas requiring improvement and measuring progress, while promoting healthy competition.
Under the new framework, universities, polytechnics and colleges of education will be assessed under a unified national ranking system. The Federal Government is expected to fund the exercise through the Tertiary Education Trust Fund.
Alausa said the 2026/2027 ranking exercise for universities would begin in September, while the newly constituted committee would determine when the exercise would be extended to polytechnics and colleges of education.
“The 2026/2027 ranking exercise for universities would commence in September, while the committee would determine the appropriate timeline for extending the exercise to polytechnics and colleges of education,” he said.
The minister added that the government would develop guidelines to institutionalise the ranking system and formally notify vice-chancellors and heads of other tertiary institutions that participation was mandatory.
He said the policy was part of President Bola Tinubu’s education reforms under the Renewed Hope Agenda and the Nigeria Education Sector Renewal Initiative.
Alausa also pledged the support of the Federal Ministry of Education in providing policy direction, funding and capacity-building programmes needed to make the ranking exercise credible, sustainable and effective.
According to him, the ministry would work with the committee to organise in-service training and institutional capacity-building programmes across tertiary institutions, with the goal of improving the global visibility of Nigerian institutions.
The Minister of State for Education, Prof. Suwaiba Ahmad, described the initiative as an important step towards strengthening accountability and quality across the country’s tertiary education system.
Ahmad said healthy competition would encourage institutions to evaluate their performance, identify weaknesses and take measures to improve the quality of education they provide.
She stressed that the ranking exercise should cover both public and private institutions, saying a comprehensive system would help establish and maintain minimum standards across the sector.
The minister said the exercise would enable institutions to better understand their strengths and weaknesses and pursue measurable improvements as Nigeria’s tertiary education system expands.
The Chairman of the ranking advisory committee and former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, Emeritus Professor Peter Okebukola, said the committee’s engagement with the Minister of Education followed a memorandum congratulating the Federal Government on the growing number of Nigerian universities gaining recognition in international rankings.
According to Okebukola, the committee had also advocated increased investment in university education to sustain and accelerate the progress recorded by Nigerian institutions.
He said the minister’s response went beyond the committee’s initial proposal by expanding the mandate of the Nigerian Universities Ranking Advisory Committee to include polytechnics and colleges of education.
The development led to the transformation of the committee into the Nigerian Tertiary Education Ranking Advisory Committee.
Okebukola expressed optimism that sustained investment, improved institutional capacity and the new national ranking framework would enable more Nigerian tertiary institutions to make significant progress in international rankings.
He said the framework would provide institutions with the opportunity to benchmark their performance and compete more effectively with leading institutions globally.
The new policy comes amid growing pressure on Nigerian tertiary institutions to improve their positions in international rankings, which often consider factors such as research output, academic reputation, citations, international outlook and institutional resources.
While an increasing number of Nigerian universities have secured places in global rankings, challenges including inadequate funding, limited research capacity, infrastructure deficits and staffing constraints continue to affect their competitiveness.
The expansion of the national ranking exercise to polytechnics and colleges of education is expected to create a more coordinated approach to measuring institutional performance across Nigeria’s entire tertiary education system.
Making participation compulsory also represents a shift from voluntary involvement to a structured system in which institutions will be required to submit relevant data and measure their performance against nationally defined benchmarks.
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