Federal University of Education Zaria Admits 5,000 Students in Its First Intake

When a college becomes a university, the change goes well beyond a new name on the gate. The Federal University of Education Zaria (FUEZ), which grew out of one of the oldest colleges of education in Northern Nigeria, shows how much work that transition involves. A year into his tenure, its pioneer Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Yahaya Isa Bunkure, has explained how it has gone so far, from the first student intake to the staffing problems he had to solve.

Why colleges of education are becoming universities

Prof. Bunkure says the reasoning starts with teacher supply. The old Grade II teacher training colleges have been phased out, and the NCE programme is no longer as prominent as it once was. The NCE is still the minimum teaching qualification on paper, but Nigeria has already produced a large number of NCE holders.

The Federal Ministry of Education also found that the country has more teachers at the lower level than at the higher level. Core sciences and English were the weakest areas, with too few qualified teachers for senior secondary school. An assessment put NCE holders at about 60 to 70 per cent of teachers in primary and secondary schools. University graduates made up only about 20 to 30 per cent of those teaching in secondary schools.

He believes this gap affects the quality of students who later enter universities. In his view, converting some colleges into universities of education does not remove their original mandate. It takes that mandate to a higher level, so that more highly qualified teachers can be trained.

A familiar road for the Vice-Chancellor

He has been through this before. He was provost of Sa’adatu Rimi College of Education in Kano when a federal assessment team found that it deserved to be upgraded. It became a university of education, and he was appointed its first Vice-Chancellor. He credits hard work, fairness to colleagues and loyalty to the government of the day.

President Bola Tinubu appointed him to FUEZ on 3 September 2025. After an induction at the Ministry of Education, he resumed on 17 September. He says he was warmly received, despite earlier talk that some people did not want the university to succeed. He also says he has not dismissed a single staff member or expelled a student since he arrived.

The question of who becomes a professor

The biggest early test was academic rank. Many staff were chief lecturers, some for nearly 20 years, and believed that rank should convert automatically to professor. The National Universities Commission (NUC) does not see it that way. It treats a chief lecturer in a college of education as equal to a senior lecturer in a university.

A committee set up by the Governing Council had already looked at the dossiers, and about 117 people were considered qualified. Prof. Bunkure set up a second committee to review that work. Using templates from Ahmadu Bello University, Bayero University and the University of Jos, it built FUEZ’s own placement template. Out of roughly 118 or 119 chief lecturers, only 43 qualified for professorship. That was not a popular result, but he says NUC rules leave no room to place anyone outside the approved standards.

Students, faculties and staffing

Many people wondered how a university of education would fill its classrooms while the NCE is being phased out. More than 6,000 people applied for the first intake, and about 5,000 met the admission requirements. They are spread across 31 departments in seven faculties, which include General Education, Allied Education, Science Education, Technical and Vocational Education, Languages and Social Sciences. The Faculty of Languages, for example, has about six departments.

On staffing, he says the numbers are sufficient, but the NUC expects a healthy spread of staff at the top, middle and lower levels. Before the placements, FUEZ had almost no professors. It relied on visiting professors on sabbatical for accreditation, which the NUC accepts, and ran degree programmes in affiliation with Ahmadu Bello University and Usmanu Danfodiyo University. With 43 professors now in place, he says none of the other newly converted colleges of education has the same strength at the top.

What this means

FUEZ is early in its life as a university, but its story shows how Nigeria is trying to raise the quality of teacher training. It also shows how hard it is to move an institution from one system to another.