Kenyan private varsities enrolment falls as reforms bite
Tuesday July 18 2017
A lecture hall packed to the rafters such as this one at the University of Nairobi could soon be a rare sight in many private universities after government widened the net for new students. PHOTO FILE | NMG
Reforms in the education sector have left Kenyan private universities with declining student enrolment.
Strict measures applied in the conduct and marking of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education have seen the number of students qualifying for university admission fall drastically.
These have allowed public universities to take up the majority of secondary school leavers, leaving private institutions and parallel degree courses in public universities without takers.
Consequently, the National Association of Private Universities in Kenya is calling on them to repackage themselves as centres of excellence in order to compete.
“We must wake up to the reality. Have you noticed the aggressiveness with which the University of Nairobi is advertising for students? It is no longer business as usual,” said Vincent Gaitho, the association’s secretary general.
Some private institutions are now shutting campuses and sending staff home, after most of the students who sat last year’s national exams were admitted to public universities, leaving them with very few students to pick from.
Baraton University has closed all its four satellite campuses, citing low enrolment, affecting about 600 undergraduate and graduate students and leaving the fate of hundreds of non-teaching staff unknown.
Kenya Methodist University (KeMU) laid off 150 lecturers and closed down campuses in three counties due to “dynamics affecting the education sector in the entire Kenyan economy”.
Private universities in Kenya have thrived mainly on the inadequacies in the higher education sector and mainly pick up students who have missed slots in the public universities or those admitted to courses they do not like.
However, in the 2016 KCSE examination, there was drop in the number of candidates scoring top marks, only 88,626 candidates attaining the minimum grade C+.
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This qualified them for admission into university against 96,000 vacancies in public universities. This is a big drop from 2015 examination figures where 165,766 students scored the minimum university entry grade of C+.
According to Dr Emmanuel Manyasa, an education analyst, private universities should re-strategise, pick a niche, scale down the numbers and not rely on the students they are allocated by the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service.
“Private universities cannot depend in the long term on assistance from the government for survival. Rather than try to offer everything, pick what you can do well, and you will get the numbers. We have even seen some universities offering a course in medicine when they do not have the capacity to do so,” said Dr Manyasa.
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Last year, the placement agency picked 74,389 students who sat the 2015 KCSE examination to join public universities and an additional 10,000 to join private colleges with government support.
The difference is that in the years prior to 2015, private universities absorbed candidates who scored C+ and above but were unable to get admission to public universities due to capacity constraints. This was in addition to those they were allocated by the placement board.
In 2015, for example, 91,378 of the total 165,766 students who scored the minimum university entry grade of C+ were locked out of the public university system due to lack of capacity.
Most of these students opted to pursue their career ambitions at private universities or at public ones as self-sponsored students.
Education analysts have also advised private universities to target the backlog of past students who attained the minimum entry marks but were not admitted or the diploma students who want to continue climbing the academic ladder.
The private universities are also competing for students with the technical training schools.
The government has been trying to attract students to study in technical institutions by putting in place a legal and policy framework and providing financial support for the tertiary institutions’ facelift.
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The schools recently were allocated Ksh900 million ($9 million) as loans to college students. Kenya has 65 universities with 36 being public and 29 private.
The country has, for the last half a decade, witnessed rapid growth in the number of private university campuses.
In 2016, enrolment in public institutions stood at 512,924, more than five times the 85,889 in private universities. Private universities have splurged money to set up scores of satellite campuses to cater for the demand for higher education.
“This was ill-advised as most expanded beyond reason. There was a time when there was a boom in higher education, but we are now headed into recession and many campuses will be shut down,” said Dr Manyasa.
The placement service’s chief executive, John Muraguri, had asked private universities to adjust to the lower numbers by being innovative.
Some are reaching out across the border to attract students. Kenyatta University, Mount Kenya University and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology already have campuses in Rwanda and Tanzania.
United States International University goes round the region every three years pitching for students.