STATE
OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN KENYA
When
former president Hon Mwai Kibaki elevated The Kenya Polytechnic University College
to Technical University of Kenya early this year, it was hugely expected to
start a new road map under which higher education in Kenya would be expanded and
made accessible to the rapidly increasing population.
Little did we know that that was not to be case, more
universities across the country were chattered bringing to a total number of
public universities to twenty. Although this was a good initiative by the
government in a bid to streamline vision 2030 agenda, but now the move seems
ill timed and misplaced. The new universities are facing multiple challenges of
coping up with the bulky number of students admitted by the joint admissions
board (JAB) each year. Most of them lack enough infrastructure, academic resource
materials, academic staff and accommodation. It therefore leaves us with a huge
question whose answer cannot be fathomed. How does a student gets admitted in a
university where there is limited or no academic facilities?
According to the University’s Act, universities are
supposed to be research and innovation (www.cue.or.ke/ ) centres to provide the country with
necessary labour skills in different sectors.Instead; most universities have
become theory oriented even in purely technical courses like design,
engineering and journalism. Students no longer spend time in practical fields;
instead they attend a heavy schedule of lectures ranging from morning to
evening throughout the week. Most of these schedules do not take into account
that students are supposed to spend time in libraries gathering academic
resourses.at the same time these academic resources might not be adequate for
all the students and the lectures to conduct studies and research. It’s
disgusting that even the administrators of these institutions have turned a
blind eye to these obvious challenges. Most of them are either not concerned
about the welfare of the students or have given up the challenge coming up with
a realistic way of facing out these challenges. They have become too naïve to
steer a sector that is so crucial to the industry and economic development of
this country.
On the other hand, the remaining Polytechnics and
Technical institutes are slowly being swallowed by the already established
universities and turning them into constituent colleges and satellite canpuses.These
institutions are supposed to provide middle level skilled labor for the
industries that are fast developing and seal a dangerous gap that arises when
universities do not provide the required skills. It’s almost impossible to
travel nowadays a kilometer without seeing a large billboard or a hurriedly
printed banner declaring presence of a university even within an already
crowded urban center like Nairobi central business district. If this trend is
anything to go by, there is no denying that with time the country will lack the
much needed skills that cannot be adequately provided by the universities or other
institutions of higher learning.
Sectors like Agriculture, motor vehicle assembly,
design art and jua kali will most
likely to lose quality and impact negatively on the economic development of the
country.
Even though there is a common feeling among many academic
experts that education is rapidly being commercialized, whether this claim can
hold any water or not is not important, what is crucial is for various
concerned sectors to put the government to task so as to achieve equilibrium
between the output of the training institutions and the industry needs. It
simply means the universities and other institutions producing what the
industry urgently recur so that cases of wasted skills does not occur.
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| STUDENTS DURING GRADUATION CEREMONY |
The government therefore needs to seriously evaluate its
education policies that will spearhead management of higher education in the country.
Establishment of both public and private universities must be controlled while
technical institutions and national polytechnics must be protected and
autonomies besides adequately equipping and expanding their scopes in terms of
programs and training. We need to borrow a leaf from countries such as China,
Japan and Indonesia whose economies have thrived tremendously courtesy of an
industry friendly education system. Most notably of all, Japans’ education
system played a key role in countries’ economic development after the Second
World War. Of all the courses offered in vocational programs, 72% account
business and industry courses. At the same time most university students fee
are subsidized by the government and other related institutions.
This
there must act a lesson to our country. We need to reconstruct our higher
education policies and re-align them appropriately depending on how best it can
boost economic development hence make vision 2030 a reality in the offing.
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