The rat race for university admission is gradually slowing down.
Not all qualifiers strive to secure a place anymore. And there is a strong message – universities are no longer as attractive as they once were.
Last week, Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba announced the placement of students admitted to universities, and the striking outcome was the number of qualified learners who declined to apply for admission.
Here are the figures. In 2024, some 965,501 students sat the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations, and 244,563 of them attained grade C+ and above, qualifying for university admission.
However, just 201,695 of these qualifiers – representing 83 per cent – applied for university places.
A notable 42,000 opted out, presumably, intending to explore other opportunities locally or abroad.
For those who may have opted for local options, the destination could be technical and vocational training institutions and other colleges.
Indeed, national polytechnics and technical training institutions are increasingly becoming popular with high school leavers as they offer skills that are in high demand in the labour market and provide good prospects for career progression.
University education is neither the sole nor the ultimate destination for every high-achieving student. The paths to fulfilment and success are as diverse as the students themselves. Interests and preferences shape the choices they make in life. And so, there is nothing odd when some university qualifiers seek different pathways.
Nonetheless, the rising number of students shunning local universities is revealing. It points to underlying issues that education planners and decision-makers must examine and address thoughtfully.
From evidence, some of the issues that students grapple with and which influence their choices are the type of university to join and their reputation, courses offered, funding opportunities, quality of management and completion rates.
The latter has increasingly become common, especially in public universities, where students often struggle to graduate due to institutional inadequacies and persistent closures occasioned by strikes by students and lecturers.
A case in point is Moi University, where medical students who enrolled in 2016 ended up staying on the campus for nine years instead of six, putting them at a disadvantage in the job market.
Such experiences discourage potential students from applying for admission as they are uncertain about what awaits them once they are enrolled.
In recent years, a critical determinant has emerged – finance. In 2023, the current administration introduced a new financing model – Variable Scholarship and Loan Funding – billed to reform and streamline financing of students. But the model has failed, locking out needy and deserving students due to poor targeting. Coupled with the fact that the programme receives insufficient budgetary allocations from the National Treasury, it has caused grief for the students and crippled the institutions.
Matters are made worse by the persistent high levels of graduate unemployment, prompting students to ask tough questions and take drastic measures.
Kenya has a large number of universities but a limited scope of courses. Most courses are duplicated across the universities and without specialisations. Some universities have introduced high-sounding programmes such as aquatic science, spatial science, hospitality management, food, nutrition and dietetics, and project management, yet these often offer limited prospects for career advancement.
A closely related example is the Bachelor of Education programme, which is offered in more than 50 universities, and according to statistics from the Commission for University Education (CUE), has the highest enrollment yet offers limited employment prospects. In 2022/23, for instance, the programme registered 122,000 out of the total 560,000 students enrolled in the universities, representing 22 per cent of the population.
Yet the government hires just a limited number every year, and on an internship basis. Indeed, to date, more than 300,000 trained teachers remain unemployed due to the freeze on recruitment by the government.
Granted, the issue of students opting out of university admission is not new. In 2021, the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Services (KUCCPS) gave a breakdown of student allocations to the institutions, which largely reflected their attractiveness. Six universities out of 74 were allocated fewer than half of the students they had requested because of few applicants. One university attracted less than 10 per cent of the qualifiers. About 100 courses did not attract any students.
The statistics are telling. Universities are offering obsolete or irrelevant courses and which, ideally, should be phased out or completely revised. It does not make sense to keep such programmes as they drain resources that could be better spent on pressing needs like infrastructural improvement and development.
Ironically, the government continues to expand universities, setting up new ones, but they only replicate what the existing ones are doing. For instance, the government has created two universities in recent times – Nyandarua and Kabarnet – which will begin admitting students in September. Both offer courses such as education, agriculture, business and social sciences, which are already available in the existing universities.
Essentially, there is no novelty in creating new universities other than serving political interests and, inopportunely, deepening the higher education crisis.
When put in perspective, the decline in student applications is a wake-up call and a signal that the country needs to rethink its approach to university education. Universities are losing their lustre. As constituted and managed, most of them – especially public institutions – are in bad shape yet gobble vast amounts of taxpayers’ cash. The debts are piling up, putting pressure on the National Treasury to look for more resources to bail out these higher education institutions.
Experiences from other jurisdictions provide examples of what Kenya can do to confront the crises in higher education. Faced with rising costs, declining enrollments and falling quality, countries like South Africa and Rwanda resorted to mergers and the consolidation of higher education institutions. The outcome is a lean, refreshed and sustainable higher education sector.
Given the fact that public universities are groaning under heavy debts, operate with severely limited teaching and learning resources and have a poorly motivated staff due to low pay, prudence demands reassessment of their courses. Universities should offer courses that prepare students for promising careers if they wish to attract and retain them and remain relevant.
