How JAMB course transfers are reshaping the futures of Nigerian youths

By Taiwo Ramat

Every year, something quietly unfair happens to hundreds of Nigerian students. They apply for Medicine, Law, Accounting; courses they’ve wanted since secondary school days or maybe earlier.

Then, when JAMB CAPS opens and there is a different course laying in their portal; English instead of Law, Medical &Laboratory science instead of Medicine. ‘Change of Course’, the system calls it. But for the student staring at their screen, it rarely feels that simple. Technically, they have a choice.

JAMB allows every student to accept or reject the new course offered. But rejecting the new course means rejecting admission entirely, walking away with nothing that session; so for many students, it was really not a choice at all but an ultimatum dressed up as an option.

Sometimes it comes down to two or three marks, the gap between the cut-off a student earns and the one their dream course demands. And just like that, an entire future gets redirected. This report draws on the experiences of students who know redirection closely. All got admitted; None of them got exactly what they asked for.

For Isaac, a student of Obafemi Awolowo University [OAU], the gap was almost nothing, about 0.2 points between his JAMB cut-off and the mark Law demanded in his catchment area. Isaac had applied for Law; he was offered Education and English instead. “I cried for days,” he told The Lagos Voice, describing what those two-tenths of a point cost him. It was not just the course he lost but the confidence he had built in his own academic ability.

For Ayokunumi, a final year student in OAU, the shift was steeper. She had applied for Accounting; JAMB offered her International Relations. “My initial reaction was to reject it. I don’t know anything about International Relations,” she said. Panicking, she checked what other course options were on the table and found History waiting there too. “My tears worsened,” she recalled.

Both students described the same quiet trap; a choice that technically existed but barely felt like one. Isaac called accepting the new course “entirely my decision” but the alternative was losing a full year and risking the exact same outcome again.

But for Ayokunumi, her decisions leaned less on her and more on the people around her. “It wasn’t fully my decision because I had the liberty to reject it actually. My father wasn’t against it; but other people encouraged me to take it, so I accepted it,” she told The Lagos Voice. She said, if anything, they were just relieved I made it into school at all.

Speaking further with The Lagos Voice, Ayokunumi mentioned that the hardest part of her transfer wasn’t adjusting to a new course. ‘I felt like an Olodo’, she admitted. In her mind, the more competitive course she had lost had been reserved for the bright students, while her new course felt like a consolation prize for second thought. That belief did not hold up for long.

Ayokunumi went on to grow genuinely fond of her new course. But the fact that a transfer could make a capable student briefly doubt his/her own intelligence says something about how deeply a course’s reputation shapes self-worth.

A change of course does not just alter what a student studies; it quietly redraws their entire career map. Long before resumption, many students have already started building an identity around the course they applied for. The sudden switch does not just interrupt the timetable, it interrupts that self image, forcing a student to grieve a future they never got to live out before they even matriculated.

Many students transferred into a new course struggle throughout their first semester, sometimes their entire first session, simply because they have not found their footing in a discipline they never chose. The effects don’t end at graduation. By then, the career path has already been quietly shaped and most students are left with little choice but to play along with whatever direction their reassigned course has set them on.

Nafisat, a graduate of University of Lagos while echoing the same sentiment to The Lagos Voice said it took her four years of writing JAMB before finally gaining admission into the University of Lagos. “But it was not for the course I wanted, I applied for Political Science and was given Sociology. It felt like a denial. I gave it a shot in 2020, but again I was not offered my preferred course.”

She added; “I thought maybe that was my fate, so I stayed. Looking back now, I feel that decision has had a lasting impact on me since graduating.”

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As a graduate of Philosophy from the University of Lagos, rather than chasing jobs tied to a course she didn’t feel suited for; she opened a business instead. Her case reflects a wider pattern among students pushed into unwanted courses; many graduate without a clear sense of how their certificate fits the job market, and end up building careers entirely outside their field of study; informal, self-made, and disconnected from four years of coursework.

There is a quieter cost too; falling behind peers who studied their chosen course on purpose. While an interested student spends four years building internships, mentors and real expertise in their field, a redirected student often spends that same stretch of time adjusting, catching up or still mentally holding onto a different career.

What ties these stories together is not the course each student ended up in but how little support met them once they got there. No counselling. No orientation into what the new course actually involved. No real guidance beyond a portal notification and a narrow window to decide.

The choice that reroutes a person’s entire career is handed down in isolation with a countdown attached, and treated as a completed transaction the moment ‘accept’ is clicked. That silence doesn’t end at graduation; it just changes shape.

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There is no system tracking how many students end up in unrelated jobs, how many start businesses out of necessity rather than ambition, or how many are still quietly trying to find their way back into the career they originally wanted .

When asked what Ayokunumi wished the system had done differently, one respondent pointed to faster admission processing, less paperwork and a genuinely functional digital portal. She also mentioned that Universities should stop admitting more students than each department can take,other than having spill overs to other departments.

The students in this report represent different outcomes to the same broken process. None of them arrived at these outcomes through planning. Each was shaped by a decision made within minutes, under pressure, with no counselling, no guidance and no follow up to assess how it ultimately played out.