MERCILIN:Let universities focus on offering degrees and postgraduate programs

If enacted, the move will see greater changes in the education sector,  as well as strengthen the tertiary institutions. The proposal coincides with the recommendation by the presidential working party on education reforms submitted last year, a taskforce which was appointed by President William Ruto to address the challenges troubling the education sector in the country.

Universities should concentrate on their core business of offering postgraduate certificates and diploma, degree programs and doctoral studies. This will help the government to ensure proper regulation of the institutions through the Commission for University Education, CUE and other regulatory bodies.

The Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service,  KUCCPS should play an important role in ensuring that all diploma and certificate students are placed in technical institutions, a move which will see improvement in the quality of education provided in Kenya. Currently,  there is high competition between technical institutions and universities in enrollment of students in which case most learners prefer the higher institutions over the colleges. This has been the core reason as to why most graduates from the universities are incompetent in the labour market. You find that a given university enrolls many learners for various courses while it has very few lecturers who can take the learners through the program they register to undertake.

In this case there will be no, or very minimal interaction between the lecturer and the learners since the lecturer has many classes which he/she is expected to attend to. The most disadvantaged are the learners. Let us take for instance, a case where the learners are supposed to do practicals. The lecturer can not take the learners through the practicals one by one to ensure they all cooperate and understand because the students are very many at the same time, the time is limited because some other groups also may want to access the practical room and so the best thing the lecturer will do is to assume that everybody has understood and move on with the syllabus.

 I suppose higher institutions should not be a place where theory is being taught but instead the learners should focus on doing practicals to prepare them for the job market. But this can not be possible if all diploma, certificate and degree students are congested in one institution and at the same time the learning equipments including those for teaching and doing academic research are few.

The universities will be disadvantaged yes, in terms of their revenue but they can still use alternative sources to fund their projects.

Furthermore, the same way the technical institutions can not teach degree courses, let universities also not be tasked to provide diploma and certificate courses. Giving universities mandate to offer education which ought to be taught in technical colleges and institutes does not respond to the need of the country to have technical workforce and if not addressed, the universities might take over the roles of the technical institutions which may lead to their collapse.