Private varsities rocked by severe funding crisis

When in 2016, the government mooted a plan to sponsor students to study in private universities, the objective was novel. It was part of a strategic plan to decongest public universities and give more qualified candidates a chance to pursue higher education.

 That was the first time the government would enter a structured arrangement with private universities to select students for them and pay their fees.

This was coming against a backdrop where many Form Four candidates qualified for university admission but could not get places because of space constraints in public universities. So, it was a quick solution for expanding access to university education, especially for those from poor households, who without admission to public universities or government funding to join private universities, would not progress with their studies.

On their part, this was a boost to private universities as it enabled them to get more students and cash from the Exchequer to support top learners who had met the cut-off and would otherwise terminated their academic journey.

Sh250,000 a year

However, this novel idea has turned out to be one of the stressful experiences for private universities. In the first year of the plan, the government undertook to pay Sh70,000 for every student admitted to the private universities, just as it does with those in public universities.

To ensure equity, those students were required to top up the fees by paying Sh16,000, again the same rate as those in public universities. In effect, the fees was pegged at Sh86,000 a year. This additional cash was to be sourced from the Higher Education Loans Board.

For the private universities, this was a climbdown. Ordinarily, the lowest fees in any private university is Sh250,000 a year. Most of them charge far higher fees, even two times, depending on the institution and course.

Yet despite acceding to that concessionary arrangement, the private universities were to get a shocker. For the government failed to remit the cash to the universities. What that means is that the private universities taught the students for free for a full academic year. Put differently, the private universities ended up subsidising education for government-sponsored students.

This context provides the background on the goings-on in private universities, which are facing double-edged problems. First is the declining number of students qualifying for university education and two, government’s reluctance to pay fees for those it sponsors. Three, they are reeling under the ravages of Covid-19.

In a wide-ranging interview with the chairperson of the Kenya Association of Private Universities (KAPU), Prof Mumo Kisau, told Higher Education that the government subsidy deal has precipitated so much pain. Private universities are suffering serious budget deficits.

Matters have been made worse by the diminishing numbers of self-sponsored students as university qualifiers shrink given the strict systems of administration of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations that cut out cheating that used to thrive in the past and produce inordinately high numbers of top graders.

In 2017, the private universities took up the matter with the Education Ministry and to compensate them, the government allocated them Sh2.6 billion, which when distributed across the students amounted to Sh70,000 for every learner.

But in subsequent year, the figure went down to Sh2.4 billion yet the number of students had increased to 56,000 learners. So each received an average of Sh45,000 a year, far below the annual fees.

“We operate in a situation where private universities have to look elsewhere for resources to keep government sponsored students and that has adverse effect on our finances and ultimately affect our programmes,” said Prof Kisau. “This is not sustainable and we implore the government to raise cash allocations for students it sponsors in private universities.”

For this reason, he says private universities have sent representations to the Ministry of Education to review the funding arrangement and raise the capitation to reflect the real cost of teaching those students. Ideally, Prof Kisau says, the government should remit Sh5.6 billion to the universities for the students it sponsors.

Prof Kisau, who is the vice-chancellor of Scott Theological College in Machakos, says the challenges of private universities have been exacerbated by Covid-19. The closure of all educational institutions in March to contain spread of the pandemic has affected both public and private universities. However, the private universities have felt the pinch most.

 This is because they depend largely on fees collected from students for their recurrent expenditures, including paying salaries. Without fees, now for five months, some private universities have been forced slash staff salaries, send some on unpaid leave or retrench.

Slash salaries

Last week, for example, workers of Nazarene university went to court seeking orders to stop the university from slashing their salaries. Already, many of them had been sent on unpaid leave and since, the universities had indicated it would take more actions by end of this month, which was interpreted by the workers to mean salary and job cuts.

The judge, Justice Stephen Radido, declined the workers’ plea and instead asked them to enter into a dialogue with the university to reach an amicable solution that would not harm them and ruin the institution. Catholic University has also been forced to cut salaries as the cash crunch hits.

To date, the country has 18 fully-charted private universities, five private university constituent colleges and 14 operating with letters of interim authority. Collectively, they have an enrolment of about 100,000, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.

 Out of these, about 60,000 are admitted through the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Services and sponsored by the government. At least three private universities – Strathmore, USIU and Aga Khan – do not admit government sponsored students. They have their own systems and have been able to attract large numbers.

A general observation made about private universities is that they offer mainly arts and social science courses, which in some circles is viewed as a gap in the sense they do not give a wide range of programmes. However, Prof Kisau argues that not should not be used against the institutions. For one, private universities supplement government’s efforts to offer university education.

It is not the responsibility of the private universities to offer science and technology and engineering programmes, the government should do that because it collects taxes from the citizens.

At any rate, he says, since mounting those programmes is costly, having private universities offer them would make far expensive and beyond reach of most people.