Are College of Education Offering Medicine, Nursing, Law etc?

Some candidates have been asking whether they can choose courses like Law, Medicine, SLT, Business Administration, Accounting, etc at colleges of education. You’ll need to ask this question if you’re just starting out.

Candidates who have tried admission before or who have been engaged with a career may not need to be asking if courses like English, Nursing, Medicine, Marketing, Pharmacy, Engineering, etc can found at colleges around us.

If you belong to the former group, I’m here to shed light on some things regards what and what you may or may not go for at a college of education.

Before then, let’s get the basics.

College of education is the third category of higher institutions of learning in Nigeria. Others include universities, Polytechnics, and Innovative Enterprises Institutions (IEI).

Colleges of education are responsible for producing graduates who are capable to teach at our primary schools. They award Nigeria certificates of Education (NCE) which gives their graduates the qualification to be employed as teachers – especially at the primary level of Nigerian education.

Colleges of education are meant to train any specialist other than teachers. Hence, you may not be able to study your favourite Microbiology, Biochemistry, Nutrition, and Dietetics and so on at a college.

In other words, whatever course they over is education. Therefore, if they offer Mathematics, it will be in education. If they offer Biology, it will be in education.

You may as well be confused about the way colleges name their courses. In universities, for instance, a student offering education in Chemistry will tell you, “my course is Chemistry Education” or he may say, “Education Chemistry”. This is not the same in Colleges.

Colleges combine two majors in naming their courses. For example, let’s see the pattern below.

You may find more of this combination on Emmanuel Alayande College of Education list of courses.

However, colleges still name some courses with single words just like the universities. For example, a few colleges still have Agriculture, Business Education, Accounting Education, Electrical and Electronics Education, etc.

And for colleges that run degree courses too, you will find enough courses with single names. For example, Adeyemi College of Education runs degree programmes in affiliation with Obafemi Awolowo University. College of Education Ilesa and College of Education Abeokuta etc do the same with the University of Ibadan. College of Education Ila-orangun does the same with Ekiti State University.

For such affiliation degree, you will have courses like the main universities – UI, OAU, EKSU etc. Hence, the course name will be:

While seeking admission, you may be thinking the same courses are being offered across all higher institutions. This is not true. And for the college of education, you’re limited to education courses only. When you’re done, you’re more likely going to end of teaching.