New university colleges increase admissions capacity

Kenya will admit 7,000 extra students to its universities in the next academic year, making use of additional capacity in the form of new colleges. This brings to 41,000 the number of students who will join universities in the coming academic year, up from 34,000 admitted last year – a 20% jump.

Eight new university colleges created over the past year will admit 4,500 of the additional 7,000 students – an indicator that Kenya’s existing universities are finding it increasingly difficult to boost intake due to infrastructural strains.

The increased intake and the ability of new university colleges to take up the extra students signals that the policy with which government has been struggling – to upgrade tertiary colleges – could finally be bearing fruit in helping ease one of Kenya’s biggest higher education challenges: admissions.

Over the past year, Kenya has upgraded several tertiary institutions into university colleges as it seeks to end an admissions crisis facing its public universities. The number of school-leavers seeking university education has been rising faster than the rate at which universities are creating new capacity by expanding infrastructure, leading to strained facilities and compromised quality of learning. During the last intake, some of the existing university colleges could hardly take more students due to a funding shortfall.

But even as Kenya admitted the additional students, the number of those missing out on university places has been rising, worrying educationists.

Due to space constraints, more than half of the 118,256 eligible students – 76,000 – will miss out on a place at a public university. And with only 41,000 securing places in public universities, the balance, at least 77,256, will be forced to seek education in the costly private universities, join the equally expensive parallel programme, or proceed to tertiary colleges and youth polytechnics.

The challenge of sorting out the admissions crisis has posed a policy headache for the government, leaving it grappling with several strategies, most of which have failed to materialise or have been slow to pick up. Last year, for example, Kenya announced it was in talks with private universities, in a deal that would have seen it use the massive idle capacity in these institutions to admit regular students.

But the plot came a cropper after private providers demanded several incentives that the government declined to give as they would have come with heavy budgetary implications for the already strained public purse. The private investors, for example, were seeking removal of a number of taxes, especially one on educational materials.

The university colleges are increasingly important at a time when the government is seeking ways of admitting at least 40,000 extra students over the next few years, to clear what is a two-decade-long backlog.

As previously reported in University World News, the government plans to raise allocation to universities in the next fiscal year, which begins in July. A huge chunk of the increased budget will be channelled to the new colleges.

A government paper tabled in parliament a fortnight ago, which will guide the annual allocation when East Africa’s biggest economy reads its 2012-13 budget in June, shows that universities will receive KSh60 billion (US$732 million), up from the KSh44 billion they received in the current fiscal year. More than 10% of this is expected to be disbursed to the colleges to help build infrastructure and hire staff.

In the next two years, the Kenyan government hopes to roll out a fresh strategy, which will see universities, all of which are currently clustered in urban areas, spread their wings to more rural areas and offer locally appropriate courses such as dry-land farming, tourism and hospitality, marine sciences and environmental resources. The thinking behind this, educationists involved in the reforms said, is also to give a much-needed human capital boost to the Kenyan economy's key drivers – agriculture and tourism – in addition to helping raise enrolments.