Kenyan universities fail quality test among world’s best in new ranking

The global competitiveness of Kenya’s universities has once again come under the spotlight following a poor showing in a new ranking.

None appears among the top 1,000 in a survey by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), in which Africa is represented by only three — all of them from South Africa.

They are University of Cape Town at 259, University of Witwatersrand at 393 and University of Kwazulu-Natal at 473.

Harvard leads a pack of 17 US universities, which appear top on the list.

In terms of regional representation, Europe has 208, the Americas 184, while Asia/Pacific have 106 universities in the top 501 ranking.

The survey used benchmarks such as number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution.

The absence of Kenyan and indeed other African universities from the list means most graduates coming from the continent are disadvantaged and less prepared to join the global labour force.

ARWU says the findings are taken seriously by universities, governments, the public and the media worldwide.

“There is enormous attention given to every league table that is published as well as its quality ranking. And they are taken seriously by students, government and especially by the media,” said Ms Ellen Hazelkorn, the main author of a new study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which studied the influence of university rankings.

High ranking means more prestige and ability to attract foreign students and high-profile scholars.

The OECD study found that 57 per cent of institutions “believe league tables and rankings are influencing the willingness of other institutions to form partnerships with them.”

A series of another global university rankings have also cast doubt on the competitiveness of Kenyan universities.

Conducted by Spanish Research firm Webometrics, the ranking focuses on an institution’s online visibility, generation of research and scholarly activity — key academic tools by which modern institutions of higher learning should be judged.

In its latest survey that included 12,000 institutions, Webometrics ranked only two Kenyan universities — Nairobi and Strathmore — among the top 50 in Africa.

The University of Nairobi is at number 26, the highest ranking in Kenya, while Strathmore is at position 31.

The other public universities are almost at the tail-end of the ranking with Moi coming at 74, Kenyatta at 80 and Egerton at 97.

If these results are anything to go by, it means that graduates from Kenya’s universities will be subjected to a judgement based on the ranking of the institution they attended, which raises questions of employability, especially in the international labour market.

The situation is grave considering that local universities have been expanding at a breakneck speed with campuses and constituent colleges taking over middle-level colleges, sometimes in disregard to opposing views.

One of the immediate concerns would be the shortage of artisans if the colleges were taken over by universities, locking out students enrolling for the courses.

The appetite for university education has been rising, forcing the government through the Joint Admissions Board (Jab) to increase intake almost every year.

This year, for instance, the number of government-sponsored students joining public universities has gone up by 4,000 to 24,300.

There have been concerns that quality of education was going down, sometimes because of the growing enrolment, while the faculty continues to be overwhelmed.

Areas that have been identified as waning in value include research, which define most respected rankings.

Popular MBA

For example, the MBA programme has become more popular in Kenya among the working class, who have trooped back to class through the parallel programme.

But the size of classes has meant sometimes that students end up colluding to pass examinations while others have been accused of hiring researchers to help with projects that they cannot control or understand.

The Commission for Higher Education, which is the quality watchdog, has been on the spotlight, being asked to arrest erosion of content while matrices show Kenya is ripe for an expanded university education.