KENYA: Record number of students to enrol

Faced with strained facilities and concerns over falling quality of education, public universities are bracing to absorb 17,000 students later this year, the highest number of candidates ever, writes Mwaura Kimani in Business Daily.

The universities' Joint Admission Board, or JAB, said it would admit all the 2007 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education candidates who had scored an overall grade of B (plain) of 66 points and above. All female candidates with a minimum aggregate of grade B of 64 points would also be admitted under the JAB gender admission criteria, the Board announced in a statement during a meeting at the University of Nairobi.

This will be the highest number of candidates to be admitted to Kenya's seven public universities. Institutions have been enrolling about 10,000 students annually, partly due to donor conditions and partly because that was the number of students universities could accommodate. But since last year, there have been calls for admissions to be delinked from the universities' bed capacities.

Despite increased admissions, 66,134 candidates who qualified for university will not be admitted.
Full report on the Business Daily site