Why university education in Kenya is losing its value

Some people say that you learn so much in the 4 years in high school than the 4 years in campus. This statement has some truth in it when you carefully look at the state of education in Kenyan universities. Today, the universities have turned into businesses. Their focus on money has made most of them lose track of the main reason why they were established in the first place.

Why are universities admitting more students without upgrading the existing facilities?

Most public universities (if not all) are today are admitting more students than they can handle. How can you increase the number of students every year when you are not building more facilities to accommodate the increasing number of students? Why increase the number when you are not employing more lecturers? How can a university deliver quality education when it is not improving the facilities to handle the increased number of students?  How can a university campus that could only comfortably accommodate 3000 students accommodate 10 000 today using the same facilities? These are some of the hard questions that Kenyans should ask the public universities.  If Kenyans don’t seek answers to these questions soon, university education will completely lose it value in the coming years.

Corruption in public universities

There is so much corruption in Kenyan public universities today.  There are people who use money to get degrees.  There are others who sleep with lecturer’s to get straight A’s at the end of the year. There are some who fail because they have a lecturer hates them for some reason. 

This does not mean that there are no students who genuinely work to for their degrees. It just shows that things are not the way they should be in the higher institutions of learning in Kenya. 

In some public universities, it is possible to have someone else sit for exams on your behalf without anyone noticing. This is because the majority of lecturers do not know their students despite teaching them for years.  This happens either because there are too many students in a given class or because the lecture never comes to teach, he/she only gives out “handouts”.

Should employers judge graduates based on there certificates?

An employer who wants to get the best employees should never judge people based on what they scored in the university.  Looking at the state of education in the universities, marks don’t really reflect a person’s abilities. 

Instead, the employers should put in place a system that measures a person’s ability. They should test each and every person with a degree to really know their abilities. A person with a second class degree can be so much better than a person with a first class degree.  Job advertisements with the statement such as “first class honors or second class upper degree only” only locks out people who may turn out to be the best employees.

Do you agree?