Immediate past President, Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, has cautioned that the unchecked rise in tuition fees has intensified student dropouts and reduced admission rate among students from low-income backgrounds into public universities.

This development, according to him, undermines the goals of the Students’ Loan Act, which aims to ensure equal access to tertiary education, regardless of economic status.

Speaking in Abuja during the 2025 TETFund National Town Hall Meeting, Osodeke accused some vice chancellors of exploiting the student loan initiative to arbitrarily raise tuition fees.

He alleged that some universities were not only hiking fees astronomically but also engaging in double collection, charging students while also drawing funds from the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), without refunding the students.

Osodeke’s remarks came on the heels of an exclusive report by The Guardian, which quoted NELFUND as expressing concern over the steep increase in tuition fees by some institutions, ranging between 20 and 521 per cent.

A document obtained exclusively from the Fund, titled “Report on Framework to Mitigate the Impact of Increased Institutional Charges on the Fund’s Operations,” revealed that the surge in tuition fees, particularly in programmes such as Medicine, Nursing, and Law, has placed a heavy financial burden on students and strained NELFUND’s resources.

According to the report, the affected institutions include the University of Ilesha, Osun State; Ekiti State University; University of Medical Sciences, Ondo; Edo State University; Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), Oyo State; and David Umahi Federal University of Health Sciences (DUFUHS), Ebonyi State.

This development comes barely six months after The Guardian reported that no fewer than 51 institutions were implicated in illegal deductions and exploitation of the loan scheme. In July, the newspaper also revealed that NELFUND had rejected loan applications from 10 tertiary institutions following excessive tuition increases of up to 900 per cent.

Further findings by our correspondent showed that some institutions had again raised their institutional charges for the 2025/2026 academic session. These include the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB), which increased fees by between 25 and 67 per cent; Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE), by between 10 and 120 per cent; and Kogi State Polytechnic by between 115 and over 1,000 per cent.

Addressing the gathering, Osodeke asserted that ASUU had been vindicated in its earlier opposition to the introduction of the loan scheme. He maintained that what Nigerian students need is not loans but grants, arguing that the current policy only deepens their financial burden.