• The universities are to blame for this because they are supposed to drive the market.
• students themselves have not been guided properly to understand the market.
Image: JACK OWUOR
Universities are the real problem. I don’t think they have studied and understood market dynamics.
There is so much duplication of courses with the assumption that these are the courses with a ready market.
The universities are to blame for this because they are supposed to drive the market.
The universities are trying to come up with courses which are cheaper to run.
What they know is they just need anyone to stand in front of class and teach, nothing more.
There is also another face of the problem because the students themselves have not been guided properly to understand the market.
So, they will just go for a course for the sake of it. That makes the courses unattractive to others when graduates start tarmacking.
If a university is serious about offering courses which are going to help students, they must not duplicate courses for the sake of it or run courses without any market research.
What we see in the universities websites is a shopping list of courses just for the sake of it.
If universities are serious, they need to start offering a few courses which they know there is a market for and students are coming over to apply for them.
There is a need for serious policy to control the type of courses offered by different universities.
Each university should be allowed to offer degrees on areas they have strength.
Universities are supposed to specialize in certain fields.
For instance, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology was supposed to offer only that specialty.
But what has happened is that universities have veered off to offering any course.
Universities should be controlled to specialise.
In Kenya, we are being pushed by the mushrooming of universities even into the villages in the name of expansion.
Every county now wants to have its own university.
Actually, I have seen every governor pushing for a public university in their county.
Universities have been ethnicised into nursery schools where every village wants to have one.
Universities are national institutions of higher learning and should be regarded as such.
Professor Okwach Abagi spoke to The Star