Private varsities to admit State-sponsored students

Kenya’s private universities are eyeing a fresh income stream as the government seeks their services to help ease an admissions crisis in public institutions.

Higher Education minister William Ruto on Monday said the ministry had opened talks with private universities to have them admit at least 20,000 students who qualify to join public universities annually, but miss out for lack of capacity.

The deal, which will see the government pay private universities for additional students admitted, is expected to break new grounds in the way Kenya’s institutions of higher learning will handle rising demand for university education in the next decade.

Mr Ruto held discussions with vice chancellors and council chairmen of Kenya’s 23 private universities to hammer out a deal that could help ease the admissions crisis in public universities and significantly increase the university student population.

Vice chancellors, who attended the meeting, said the plan was agreed upon and that a team of ministry officials and representatives of the private universities had been assigned the task of drafting the framework for its execution.

The arrangement, if successful, should aid the planned intake of at least 40,000 extra students to clear a backlog caused by long university closures that has in the past required public universities to double their intakes every year.

Public universities last doubled their admissions in 1985 as the government moved to clear a backlog caused by long closures after the 1982 attempted coup.

The move has since been blamed for the strain on physical and academic resources in public universities and their near conversion into enterprise centres that channel more of their resources towards parallel rather than regular programmes.

“There is a lot of idle capacity in private universities,” Mr Ruto said. “We are discussing the possibility of using these facilities to fix the admissions crisis in public universities,” he said.

Under the arrangement, the government will pay private universities the same amount of money it spends on each student in a public university.

“We know that this is a very touchy issue because private universities want to keep positions to themselves, but we think that there is additional capacity in our private universities,” the minister said.

Revenue stream

The plan is being seen as capable of raising the annual admissions capacity of Kenyan universities to more than 80,000 creating space for the more than 40,000 students who qualify for university education each year but are locked out for lack of capacity.

This year alone, only 24,000 students out of 82,000 who qualified will join public universities under government sponsorship.

The rest will have to fight out for places in private or join public universities as self sponsored students who bear a much higher cost burden.