Samuel Oladipupo Essoodee
A private university, Gregory University, Uturu, in Abia State, has offered the 15-year-old boy who emerged the overall best candidate in the Unified Tertiary Matriculations Examination (UTME) 2019, Ekele Franklin, straight admission.
Franklin, who scored 347 in the UTME, could be denied admission into his first choice university, University of Lagos (UNILAG), because of age as 16 is the admission age at the institution.
The registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof Is-haq Oloyede, who mentioned Franklin’s score while announcing the release of this year’s UTME results, said the teenager, who is from Imo State, maight not be offered admission due to his age.
However, Chancellor of Gregory University, Prof Gregory Ibe, has directed the university to offer ‘immediate admission’, as well as a tuition free scholarship to Franklin.
The university spokesperson, Ogbonnaya Ogwo, said in a statement on Sunday.
Also, Gregory University has offered admission and scholarship to Emmanuel Chidebube, a 16-year-old boy from Abia, who came second with a score of 346 in the UTME.
Ibe appealed for the removal of age limitation in the admission process in the Nigerian university system, the statement said.
Such limitation, the chancellor said, was a “stumbling block placed on the way of specially gifted children” in the country.
The courses the two teenagers want to study at the university are unknown for now but Ibe urges the parents of the two teenagers to go ahead and commence their registration in any programme of their choice in the university.
Gregory University, named after a Catholic Pope, was founded in 2012.
The university, according to information on its website, has eight colleges, which include medicine and health sciences, engineering, environmental sciences, agriculture, natural and applied sciences, and a college of social and management sciences.
Others are law and humanities.
