Maseno University first-year students take a selfie with Vice Chancellor Julius Nyabundi during the freshers’ orientation day on September 22, 2022. PHOTO | TONNY OMONDI | NMG
The University Funding Board (UFB) is proposing a review of the State higher education financing model to have students from the relatively well-to-do families pay more in out-of-pocket tuition fees at public universities.
UFB reckons that pegging State allocations on income status will help ease the perennial cash crunch at Kenya’s more than 30 public universities. It is unlikely that this will be an easy decision to make for the education bureaucrats going by their past reluctance to implement the differentiated unit cost (DUC) model.
But with the government itself always falling behind on disbursements to the universities and most of the institutions struggling to stay afloat, perhaps it is time the government bit the bullet. There can be no justification for keeping the allocations for all students at the same level it was in 1992, when the last review was done, in light of the increased expenses the universities have had to incur.
Notably, many middle-class Kenyans currently pay much higher amounts of money to see their children through primary school. Having people in this social class pay more for their children at the university would relieve the pressure on taxpayer funds and free up financing to mostly needy students.
However, university administrators should be under no illusion that raising the out-of-pocket fees for any category of students alone will solve their financial problems at the institutions.
If they don’t rein in managerial indiscretions like the hiring and expansion sprees that have saddled the institutions with bloated wage bills, the cash crunch will persist.
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