How government funding gap is killing university education

The State has funded university education at a fixed rate of Sh70,000 per student per academic year, regardless of programme of study, for the last 26 years.

What this means is that for a dentistry student, State funding leaves a gap of Sh530,000 per academic year. For the entire five-year training programme then, the funding gap per student stands at Sh2.65 million.

By extension then, for a dentistry programme class of 30 students, the funding gap passed on by the State to that university becomes Sh79.5 million every graduation cycle of five years.

For the arts courses that cost Sh144,000 per student per academic year and funded by the State at Sh70,000, the funding gap stands at Sh74,000 per student. For a four-year academic programme, that gap stands at Sh296,000 per student. By extention then, for an average class size of 100 students, the funding gap in that programme alone stands at Sh29.6 million every graduation cycle.

Similar calculations can be made across all academic programmes to determine the funding shortfall by the State per student per academic year, and even per programme per academic year.

To give an even clearer picture then, we have taken the average funding gap per academic programme over a four- to six-year duration of Sh54.55 million, multiplied this by the number of university graduates every academic year (estimated at 49,050 in 2015), to get the overall university funding gap per graduation cycle of more than Sh3 trillion.

Looking at the same picture from a different angle, the State is accepting responsibility for less than 19 per cent of the university education burden, passing on the remaining 81 per cent to universities.

In the case of the so-called govermment-sponsored students (GSS), the State purports to sponsor their university education, allocates them to different universities, sends less than 19 per cent of the cost of their education to the universities — at a time of its own convenience (often one year or more later), prohibits parents from participating in the arrangement, and sits back expecting universities to do the needful. When universities have asked for more funding, they have been advised to diversify their income streams.

Deathbed

Clearly, if the issue of funding is not urgently addressed, then university education in Kenya is on its deathbed. The financial shortfall also explains why some universities take as much as three years to pay their part-time lecturers.

So, what is the way forward? The State should treat the role of university education in the country's socio-economic agenda with the seriousness it deserves.

Instead of sentencing universities to death by strangulation through giving them a funding deficit of 81 per cent, per academic year, it should use that money to provide 100 per cent funding to a handful of qualified university students.

This will allow parents (and not universities) to fill the 81 per cent funding gap. This is because it is in the best interest of all stakeholders that our universities survive.

How can universities diversify from student fee income? The primary and global best practice is through research.

How does research happen at universities? Several different ways: State-funded research through the different ministries; private sector-funded research; and development partner-funded research.

In the case of Kenyan universities, none of these three is working at acceptable levels.

Instead of funding research at universities where professors reside with expertise in different disciplines, the State instead establishes and funds special purpose pastorals to undertake research.

A disproportionately high number of private sector companies are multi-nationals who undertake all their research in their home countries because there is no requirement of them to work with and to support local universities through research funding.

Teaching burden

Development partner research funding (whose primary beneficiary is its country of origin) cannot be effectively pertaken by Kenyan universities due to the overwhelming teaching burden loaded on them by the State (but for which they are hardly paid).

When the State sends 26,000 govermment-sponsored students universities every year (but pays only 19 per cent of the cost of teaching them), professors and lecturers in those institutions will not have the resources with which to hire either PhD students or part-time lecturers to teach the students, so they do it themselves.

As a result, they do not have adequate time to write quality funding proposals or to work effectively on the projects the proposals bring.

Among the questions to ask and to answer are: How important is university education to the State's socio-economic development agenda? Whose primary responsibility is university education, the State, or the university?

What proportion of the State annual budget should be allocated to education— and how much is indeed allocated — and at which level? Is setting up elaborate university oversight structures more important than financing the actual education itself?