Kenyatta pips Strathmore in global survey of universities

This saw it knock down Strathmore to third place at 37 on the continent and 2,833 internationally.

The latest study by Spanish research firm Webometrics shows that UoN moved up from position 17 to 14 in Africa though it fell 68 places worldwide to stand at 1,435 in July, compared to January’s ranking.

Moi University came fourth in Kenya at position 48 among the 100 best universities in Africa with a global ranking of 3,391. Egerton and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) are ranked fifth and sixth in Kenya in that order, standing at 62 and 65 in Africa and 3,960 and 4,040 worldwide.

The rankings are based on adoption of modern research, teaching, and academic publishing methods.

“International ranking of universities is valuable for local institutions, which rely on them for marketing their offerings,” said Strathmore University Vice Chancellor John Odhiambo, adding that local universities were still far from competing qualitywise with institutions in more developed nations like South Africa and the US.

The university uses the rankings to market its programmes to local and international students, citing its relatively higher ranking by Webometrics compared to its rivals in Kenya.

Dr George Kosimbei, an economics lecturer at Kenyatta University, said Kenyan universities can improve their standing if they deploy more resources to research and stick to the set high academic standards.

He noted that a retrogressive trend has emerged where lecturers with Doctorate degrees are offered instant professorships by start-up universities seeking to poach talent from established institutions. Though the choice of a university in Kenya is largely affected by cost considerations, prospective local and international students from wealthy families have started paying attention to the global ranking.

Webometrics says its goal is to encourage greater adoption of online publications and information sharing.

“The web presence and visibility are probably the best proxies for describing the overall performance of the universities in the 21st century, and possibly they are also the only ones able to classify all of them in a confident way,” Webometrics said in a statement.

Kenyan universities have in the past two years gone big on physical expansion, opening several constituent colleges without a commensurate spend on academic staffing and learning resources such as libraries.

The universities are yet to offer local degrees on a pure online platform, citing high initial costs and a deep-seated culture of classroom teaching. Funding for research has also been constrained at a time when admissions have expanded rapidly.

The low uptake of modern technologies among most African countries has seen universities in the more developed world dominate all rankings as they improve their research and teaching methods, including use of the Internet. South African universities, for instance, took up the top six spots in the top 100 Africa ranking, led by University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and University of Pretoria.

The Webometrics study ranks more than 20,000 universities around the world after assessing the volume and quality of online academic research and scholarly activity. Critics of university rankings argue that the benchmarks used do not capture the entire quality of learning, adding that the rankings tend to be oversimplified and are biased towards large and research-focused institutions.

However, Prof. Odhiambo said the Webometrics ranking was more objective as it leaves out more rigorous parameters that would worsen the standing of Kenyan universities.

Such parameters include population of foreign students, number of professors, and money spent on research that have seen old universities like Oxford and Harvard rank high on the major league tables.

Globally, Harvard retained its pole position, leading a pack of 14 US universities that topped the ranking.

The low ranking of Kenyan universities compromises competitiveness of Kenyan graduates in the global labour market. It also means a lower prestige for the local institutions on the international stage, slowing down scholarly partnerships and funding from the top league universities and donors.

Other popular international university rankings are the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), Times Higher Education (THE), and the Russian Reitor ranking that use divergent criteria to assess higher learning institutions.

The Association of European institutions of higher education (EUA) says the rankings focus predominantly on indicators related to the research function of universities.

“Attempts to measure the quality of teaching and learning generally involve the use of proxies, often with a very indirect link to the teaching process, and are rarely effective,” the association said in a recent report.

The International Rankings Expert Group (IREG) has previously announced that it will conduct an audit of the various rankings but is yet to do so.
Despite the criticism, rankings are popular among the public who see them as standards of excellence, with universities citing them in prospectuses and promotional literature.

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