.Institution laments dwindling enrollment of students

EIGHT years after, no fewer than 27,848 graduates of the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT), Enugu, will participate in a combined convocation ceremony of the school at the weekend.
Rector of IMT, Prof. Gozie Ogbodo, disclosed this at a pre-convocation press briefing for the 43rd to 50th Consolidated Convocation, as well as an art and technological innovation exhibition on Monday in Enugu.

Ogbodo said the eight-year consolidated convocation, to be held on Saturday, February 21, at the International Conference Centre, IMT Enugu, covered graduates of the institution from 2018 to 2025.
He gave a breakdown of the graduates as 2,957 in 2018; 5,859 in 2019; 5,772 in 2020, and 4,687 in 2021 for both National Diploma (ND) and Higher National Diploma (HND). Others are 5,227 in 2022; 1,955 in 2023; 1,135 in 2024, and 2,211 in 2025.

He noted that Governor Peter Mbah, top government officials and other erudite academic scholars nationwide would grace the event. The rector said that his management team had continued to resolve lingering challenges and was taking steps to rebrand the institution through “The New IMT Initiative.”

Meanwhile, dwindling enrolment of students for its programmes is currently unsettling the institution.
Investigations by The Guardian showed that the state-owned Polytechnic has, over the past three years, experienced lower student enrolment in its ND and HND programmes than in previous years.

Between 2018 and 2022, the least the IMT had graduated in its two-year ND programme was over 1,500 students, while the HND programme had graduated over 1,400 students.
In 2019 alone, the school graduated over four thousand students in its ND programme and over3,000  students in its HND programmes in 2022.