A month ago, President William Ruto held a town hall meeting in Nairobi to discuss the new university funding model that has now caused a terrible mess in higher education.
In his typical style, President Ruto took almost the entire session to single-handedly explain the merits of the new funding model that uses a mean testing instrument to determine eligibility of students who can receive government subventions to pay university fees.
Notable but not surprising, top Education ministry officials, university vice-chancellors and other higher education managers were conspicuously missing, a statement to the fact that the President believes he is the master and has answers to every question in every sector.
Which really is the cause of the crisis not only in higher education but the entire education sector, including junior secondary school. During the town hall meeting, the President was told point blank that the new funding model was unrealistic, unworkable and oppressive, and therefore, should be scrapped and the government reverts to the previous model of Differentiated Unit Cost (DUC) that had hardly been implemented for three years. But Dr Ruto was adamant.
Last week, the President appointed a committee comprising 129 members under former Fisheries Principal Secretary Japheth Micheni Ntiba to review the new funding model. In part, this was a partial admission that the model is faulty and needs review. However, the salient message was that the President deeply believes in it and would not let it go. At best, it can only be modified but the architecture remains intact.
Expansion of universities
And this takes us to the basics. What is the issue with higher education financing? The first is that the government cannot sustain higher education as currently configured. The second is that it cannot afford to pay for all students seeking university education. The third is that the universities are caught in a time warp, they are unable to innovate and sustain themselves. The fourth is political intrusion that stifles universities and blocks them from operating as independent institutions.
Moreover, political meddling has led to unplanned expansion of universities, disrupted the sector, caused disequilibrium and choked the system.
Against this background, setting up a new committee with a narrow mandate and expecting it to fix the mess in universities is being naïve or playing games – buying time hoping that the problem will fizzle out.
The purpose of the committee is to review and refine the funding model, structure of the students’ loan, practicality of categorisation of students into bands and, assess the cost of university academic programmes. As it were, the terms of reference more or less replicate what the previous team, the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms under Prof Raphael Munavu, did.
Thus, the first flaw is that the new committee is being set up to do exactly what its predecessor had done, and the question is, do we expect anything different to come out of it? Second is the failure to examine the higher education sector in its entirety – the committee has a narrow mandate. Student funding is just a small component of university financing. As argued before, university financing consists of the supply and demand side. Importantly, the main problem is well known – underfunding – and does not need a new committee to tell us about it.
Kenya has far too many universities for its eligible population. Many universities and programmes are under-enrolled, yet they run heavy capital and recurrent expenditures. Arising from this, the limited budgetary allocation available for universities is scattered across many institutions with the consequence that each receives very little to enable them to deliver quality programmes. Indeed, the fact that the universities are heavily indebted with some on the verge of going under is not news anymore.
Significantly, the committee has been split into four workstreams that are assigned specific assignments, but the point is that some of those are administrative tasks that do not merit having a full-fledged sub-committee.
The only workstream that makes sense is the one tasked to assess the costs of academic programmes across the universities. That assessment is important because it is the costs that determine the actual fees required for any programme. Even so, it is not lost that the Prof Munavu taskforce had pronounced itself on the same. Moreover, the previous DUC model introduced in 2018/19 was based precisely on programme costs. In other words, the committee will not tell us anything new.
Beyond those, none of the workstreams addresses funding of universities, provision of teaching and learning resources and governance. Moreover, there was nothing about research, which is an integral component of university education.
In the meantime, crisis persists in universities. University academic and non-teaching staff have been on strike, while many students may not continue with their studies because they cannot pay the high fees charged by the universities.
The current administration has messed up the entire education sector through misadventures and wrong choices. Political interference, including setting up serial committees, is stifling and choking higher education. Higher education reforms cannot be achieved by setting up one committee after another – that is akin to running on a treadmill.
