The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has raised concerns over what it described as an alarming surge in tuition fees by some tertiary institutions in the country. According to the agency, 10 institutions have increased their institutional charges by as much as 900 per cent for the current academic session.
The Fund disclosed that the affected institutions raised tuition from approximately ₦200,000 to ₦2 million, prompting immediate action by the agency’s system to block the affected student loan applications.
This was made known by the Executive Director of Operations, Mustapha Iyal, during a media engagement held in Abuja on Thursday.
“We have a structure on how we confirm institutional fees. Just yesterday, we stopped some applications from being processed because we compared the fee records we had from last year. Some institutions that charged ₦200,000 last year have now raised their fees to ₦2 million,” Iyal said.
According to him, the system automatically detected and flagged the discrepancies, and the affected applications were denied to prevent the disbursement of potentially inflated loans.
Iyal noted that while the agency is yet to publicly disclose the names of the institutions involved, it has commenced engagement with the management of those schools to understand the rationale behind such drastic increments.
“At the moment, we have about 10 institutions whose payments were dropped because of this. Some increased their charges by over ₦1 million. We don’t know why, but we are reaching out to them. These are loans — students will have to repay them in the future,” he added.
The Executive Director expressed concern that such arbitrary increases, if unchecked, could undermine the student loan scheme and impose a long-term financial burden on beneficiaries and their families.
He emphasized that the purpose of the student loan initiative is to ensure access to affordable education, not to facilitate excessive institutional billing.
NELFUND further called on students to provide feedback regarding any suspicious fee increases in their institutions and assured that all loan applications would continue to be scrutinized against verified institutional data.
The development comes amid ongoing debates over the rising cost of tertiary education in Nigeria and the need for greater accountability and regulation of tuition and sundry charges by public and private institutions.
