Local universities are facing serious crisis of confidence

Ideas & Debate

Local universities are facing serious crisis of confidence

Monday, May 6, 2019 21:29

By RUTHIE RONO |

While speaking during the release of 2019/2020 placements for universities and colleges at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, the newly appointed Secretary for Education George Magoha decried the quality of courses offered by local Kenyan universities.

Perhaps the most revealing argument in his remarks was that more than 100 programmes in our local universities were not selected by any student despite most of these programmes being new. Prof Magoha went further to reveal that within weeks of his appointment as the minister for Education, more than 10 applications for establishment of universities made their way to his desk.

With an unquenchable demand for education in Kenya today, institutions of higher learning have mushroomed in every nook and cranny. Needless to say, many of them have been shut due to the financial challenges currently bedevilling the sector. A casual walk in the streets of Nairobi’s city centre will reveal this scenario as many buildings are being converted to universities. Most of these cheap, low-quality satellite campuses don’t have some of the most basic facilities such as libraries, laboratories or even internet access.

A survey by Synovate carried out in 2011 showed that 57 per cent of the 1,044 respondents sampled preferred foreign universities over local ones due to a perception of high quality standards, prestige and exposure to life overseas. This perception reflects the appreciation and need for high quality curriculum, facilities, faculty and co-curricular activities among Kenyan youth. Their aspirations have been frustrated. To engage them, local universities whose standards have been viewed as declining, must now rise to the occasion and address the needs of vibrant and inquisitive youth.

Most of the challenges facing university education in Kenya especially among public universities coalesce around funding. At independence, the government set up elite national universities that only catered for a handful successful candidates. In the 1990s more Kenyans demanded access to university education. Most public universities responded by privatising their programmes through what is popularly known as Module 2. A combination of high demand for admission and inadequate government funding created a perfect opportunity for establishment of ill-equipped campuses that churned out graduates in their thousands, oblivious of quality requirements. In the same vein many private universities were also established.

The government shift to a market -based policy of financing public universities heralded a new era of reduced state support for higher education and most public universities had to formulate new ways of raising funds.

This decline in government funding to public universities has been has been steady through the years with the average per capita expenditure per student falling tremendously. With the taps of government funding running dry, the biggest loser has been the quality of education being offered. This has manifested itself in poorly trained academic staff, inadequate laboratories and libraries as well as overcrowded classrooms. The long and short of it is that the quality of graduates has not been commensurate with the demands of our rapidly evolving job market.

The fact that public universities can only raise extra revenue through tuition fees, cost-recovery measures and by commercialising their activities has left most of them without an option but to don the entrepreneurial cloak in order to raise more money. It is no wonder therefore to see some of our public universities veer into ventures like renting out property, setting up shopping malls or giving preference to ‘parallel degree’ programmes which are a financial gold mine in comparison to regular students admitted through the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS).

The decline in quality of education has occasioned uptake of admission abroad. Thankfully a few private universities in the country have become a reliable alternative for Kenyans seeking quality education and this is most evident when one looks at post -graduate education.

During a higher education conference held in Rwanda in April last year, the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA) tabled a report that painted a grim picture of the state of post-graduate studies in Kenya.

According to the report, it is estimated that up to half of post-graduate students who enroll for master's degrees do not complete their studies while less than 20 percent of PhD students completed their programmes. This is mainly attributed to inadequate lecturers with PhD in public universities. Most public universities have few lecturers available to supervise far too many students therefore giving less attention to post-graduate students.

The report also reveals that a lecturer with a PhD in local public universities serves 94 students against the 30 recommended by higher education experts. This lack of facilities and the requisite human resource has seen many students seek better education in private universities.

For instance, a private university like the United States International University–Africa (USIU-A), which has lecturer-student ratios of 1:33 with 73 per cent of their lecturers being PhD holders, offers students who are keen on quality and timely completion of their programmes with an alternative that does not necessarily involve having to travel abroad.

RUTHIE RONO, Deputy VC, Academic and Student Affairs, USIU-Africa.