Ranking of varsities to spur skills development

It is a relief that there are plans to rank universities in Kenya according to the employability and entrepreneurship of their graduates.

The proposal is welcome because it will put pressure on the institutions to continually strive to improve learning and give students relevant work skills.

It will put pressure on universities to ensure their training curricula are always aligned to prevailing circumstances and market demands.

That should bring them closer to employers than they are now, for information and feedback.

Develop capacity

It is also expected that this will put pressure on local universities to develop capacity to competently anticipate future developments and effectively plan for them.

These values are important because they will help sustain relevance in human capital development.

If the move will take competitive ranking of local universities for them to more deliberately pursue excellence in their work, then that is the way to go.

Actually, ranking of universities in places like the US does really put pressure on those lagging behind to keep chasing improvement.

We need the same spirit here if our workplaces are to be occupied by highly competent people.

Ranking lays bare strengths and weaknesses, and spurs healthy and positive competition.

Competition in turn spawns excellence, particularly if it is about business survival or at least protection of market share.

It has been the missing link among local universities, and the outcome has not been impressive.

It is not news any more that employers have in recent months openly expressed concern at the declining level of work competencies of university graduates entering the job market.

This is not to roundly condemn universities. There are those who do splendid work and whose graduates shine, but, from the employers’ perspective, they are the minority rather than the majority.

Many employers have to induct graduates extensively before they can adequately perform on the job.

The ranking on the basis of employability will certainly be a welcome improvement for employers.

It will save them the extra costs and time of having to re-train some of the fresh graduates they employ.

To know that these concerns are being considered, not least by the government as revealed by the Assistant Minister for Higher Education Kilemi Mwiria, is a welcome relief.

In making the announcement over the planned ranking of universities last Tuesday, the Assistant Minister for Higher Education Kilemi Mwiria said the exercise would push institutions of higher learning to become centres of “innovation, enterprise, and knowledge”.

The assistant minister correctly argued that this would in turn promote the quality and relevance “in higher education training”.

A complaint among employers has been that few institutions of higher learning bother to consult them in designing, assessing, and updating training curricula.

Employers should prepare to participate in the process. They should be prepared to provide data when the time comes, and freely give information necessary for assessing the qualities of graduates and the universities that trained them.

Most importantly, employers should be prepared to partner with institutions of higher learning for on the job attachment, mentorship, sponsorship and participation in curriculum development and training in the classroom.

It is the employers who know what they need and they must be prepared to spare time and resources to share this knowledge with the learning institutions.

The good thing about the timing of the idea is that even public universities now need to be competitive to particularly sustain the parallel degree programmes, which don’t get much funding from the government.

The belief is that when the ranking begins, there will be no room for complacency because that would amount to killing business.

Who would want to attend a university that employers have more or less dismissed as not being very useful to their needs?

To put the matter into clearer perspective, the universities that have consistently occupied top positions in world rankings have sustained their favourable positions because they closely relate with the employing market to keep abreast of the prevailing needs.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of them. One of the world ranking bodies, called QS, which is a fairly reputable network institution on education and careers, makes the following statement about MIT: “Teaching and research— with relevance to the practical world as a guiding principle — continue to be its primary purpose.”

In its present world ranking of universities, QS places MIT in position Five.

The key expression in describing MIT is “relevance to the practical world”.

This should be the spirit with which to pursue ranking universities in Kenya, so that they are consistently assessed in terms of their relevance to employers.

That is the practical world they have to supply with useful human capital.

Ms Mugo is the Executive Director of the Federation of Kenya Employers; email [email protected]