Should college certificates have expiry date?

The question of whether or not college degrees should have expiry date was floated in a panel discussion at the 2nd Nation Digital Summit by Nicholas Letting, the CEO of Kenya Accountants and Secretaries National Examination Board (Kasneb), Nelly Agyeman-Gyamfi of Moringa Schools, and Kenya Private Sector Alliance’s (Kepsa) Ehud Gachugu.

At face value, this question seems inane. On a deeper reflection, I realised that question created more questions and a need to confront what we understand as an education system and whether the process unveils gaps on the whole question of certification.

It is common practice for manufacturers to make products with usage guidelines, dosage and even storage protocols to ensure proper product use but manufacturers assume that nothing lasts forever and include an expiry date.

A research revealed a disturbing fact that up to 45 percent of current jobs will be obsolete in the next 10 years and it appears that the Covid pandemic just accelerated the rate of obsolescence.

In the same line of argument, should college certificates have a caveat that the said degrees will become moribund after say five years unless a mechanism ensures they remain relevant?

When one graduates, the citation states that one is given the power to read and practise that which they have qualified in, suggesting irrelevance over time.

In Kenya, we took a dive into the educational unknown by switching from the British system and introducing the controversial 8-4-4 system which has undergone so many upgrades and revisions.

The country is now transitioning into the Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC) that the government claims is more appropriate to Kenyan needs.

What we have ended up with in Kenya is a mish-mash of several educational systems running at the same time.

Do we believe that the several systems that we have tampered with are creating the manpower Kenya needs?

Outside the session, I posed the question to my friends and colleagues, who responded as indicated here-under.

Wale Akinyemi says: “It depends on what you are certified for. Why should anyone hold onto something that is obsolete? The lifetime of a certificate should be directly proportional to the relevance of the discipline for which it was certified.”

Thrity Engineer-Mbuthia says continuous professional development is much more useful, helping with up-skilling and knowledge sharing. “Graduation cannot be the end of learning but the start.”

Boniface Ngahu suggests that maybe all certification should be subjected to the CPD system. It is the continuous learning requirement that keeps the diploma relevant over time.

Joan Mutua begins by posing a question: “Why would one toil to achieve the highest levels of education if they know that their qualifications have an expiry date?”

In the US, attorneys need to take continuing education credits to maintain their licence, the continuous education is built in the profession.

A degree seems to simply be an entry document into a profession. A legitimate degree assures the potential employer that the applicant has mastered the principles of his discipline at some particular time and, therefore, is probably capable of upgrading as the situation dictates.

It has been stated many times that any degree is outdated the moment one graduates but if we accept that the attainment of the degree is just proof that the graduate has mastered certain principles in the subject matter and can competently self-tutor thereafter.

This in essence is what is commonly understood as innovation in that if the only thing graduates ever achieved was to reproduce and regurgitate what they learnt in college then there would not be progress.

Acquiring a degree simply demonstrates that one is teachable and that one has the ability to retain basic facts on the subject and by implication they are capable of learning both theoretically and in practice, too.

In a nutshell, what is clearly coming out is that if your company has a leadership disconnected from the reality of the wider business ecosystem that ignores refresher training then the whole corporate brand is certainly endangered.

William Kalombo, CEO of Marketing Africa Limited