In 2025, the Nigerian university system remains a numbers game that most students are losing. Every year, nearly two million hopefuls sit for the Joint Admission Matriculation Board exams, yet Nigeria’s 170+ traditional universities can only squeeze in about 600,000. That leaves nearly a million qualified young Nigerians effectively “stranded” by a lack of physical brick-and-mortar seats.
Miva Open University spent 2025 proving that the solution isn’t more buildings but more bandwidth. Their landmark November 2025 matriculation of over 8,000 students—their largest single intake since serial entrepreneur Sim Shagaya launched the bold experiment in 2023—was undeniable proof of concept for the digital-first open university licensed by the National Universities Commission (NUC). While traditional campuses are often paralyzed by strikes or decaying infrastructure, Miva scaled its community to over 18,000 learners across 14 undergraduate and four postgraduate programs.
The “Miva magic” in 2025 has been its blended model. They rolled out a network of study centers (targeting 770 across all local governments in the country) to provide that essential human touch and high-speed hubs for collaboration. But the real 2025 MVP is MIND, their AI learning companion. Instead of the rote “copy-and-paste” learning that has dogged Nigerian education for decades, MIND forces students into vocal, real-time debates over business case studies.
Ultimately, Miva’s 2025 has been about democratising high-class thinking. By removing the “JAMB bottleneck” and integrating Professors of Practice—industry titans who actually do what they teach—Miva is shifting the goalpost from merely “getting a degree” to actually being employable in a global, AI-driven economy.
