My Case against Parallel Admissions in Kenyan Public Universities

I have intermittently taught law at university level in Kenya since 2016. In most of my invariably overcrowded classes, it has become apparent to me that it’s high time Kenya re-examined the place of universities in her development agenda. I am particularly concerned with the internationally-accepted twin agenda for universities of national human resource development and research-led knowledge generation. On both, Kenya is disturbingly lagging behind.

It’s obviously not wise to reduce such monumental institutional shortcomings to one or two causal factors. I nonetheless think from experience that, in its present form, the parallel degree programme plays an inescapable contributory role.

And this is not an easy subject to confront because it has inherent social dynamics. For those like me who actually went through public education and have taught in the same space, it means I’ve successful personal friends and former students who’ve benefitted from the programme. Yet again such success stories are the very reason why a policy-oriented national conversation ought not to be postponed.

In its earlier incarnations from late 1990s when it was introduced, the parallel programme was justified on two important fronts viz. the need to bolster higher education access and revenue diversification for public universities. I think a third less acknowledged reason was preservation of foreign currency reserves. Around this time, many middle class families were sending their children abroad for higher education to India, Malaysia and Uganda amongst other countries which had more accessible admissions systems and were generally perceived to be cheaper. In other words, broadly-speaking, the programme had critical national security components.

I know of no one who has taught in Kenya’s public universities over the past decade who thinks that we’ve remained true to the above noble justifications. Some give it a more activist look and argue that the fact that generated revenue doesn’t seem to trickle enough down to lecturers is proof of failure. And I must admit that I somewhat share those concerns.

Yet the profiles of students I’ve had the privilege of teaching has persuaded me to look beyond and question the foundational relevance of parallel degree programme, as a system for university admissions, 20 years on.

Now, in my typical law class, I’ve had between 100–200 students, nearly evenly spread across genders. And save for consistently notable marginal representation of traditional nomadic communities, most of the ‘mainstream’ Kenya and ‘politicos’ is equitably represented. Just over 80 per cent would be those admitted through the parallel admissions system with the rest coming through the so-called government-sponsored programme.

Based on close observation and personal interactions, an increasingly significant number of those admitted under parallel programme don’t graduate on time. And they justifiably attribute this to lack of tuition fees. To be clear, this also affects government-sponsored students but it would be disingenuous to attempt a comparison.

I chose to write about this because some of my most active former students from across the breadth of Kenya are directly affected, with some unable to graduate 3 years on. Those are lost earning years with direct bearing on how they contribute to lift their families out of poverty. Importantly, their predicament triggered my curiosity to question why we’re stuck with a dual university admissions system that is globally obsolete.

Across the globe, competitive universities nowadays employ vast array of considerations in their national admissions processes besides course-aligned strict academic requirements, and for the most part eschew financial considerations. So in multi-racial societies, race becomes a consideration. In multi-ethnic societies, ethnicity becomes a factor. And where, as it should be in Kenya, internationalisation is an objective, a quota is preserved for international students.

In nearly all these societies, funding is left to a dedicated public institution that employs rigorous means-tested system to allocate student loans. In other words, if my daughter scores A-plain and demonstrates some commitment to society, her immediate reward ought to be broad competitive course choice not public-sponsored tuition waiver if I can afford. Juxtaposed figuratively, the USA government has no business awarding Malia Obama student loan with her parents earning reported Kshs. 6.5 billion for their memoirs.

Empirically, the reverse is largely true with the parallel programme at the moment, as the case of my former students demonstrate. Outside broad basic academic requirements, ability to pay determines admission and graduation under the programme, although that is less openly acknowledged. And that is certainly not fair. With a data-driven public agency, I’ve no doubt that Kenya has sufficient resources to implement truly inclusive student loans in public universities.

*Dr. Erick Komolo is a Fellow at Harvard Law School /
@ekomolo

NB: print version of this piece appeared in Kenya’s Daily Nation as “Inclusive Student Loans can Help Us Ditch Parallel Degrees”

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