A post by a local television station, Citizen, claiming that over 2,632 students scored a C plus and above in the 2019 KCSE exams missed university places is misleading.
The post, published and aired on April 27 on the Citizen TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3R2-5N6RTM claimed that the students, despite qualifying for a university place, did not secure admission.
While this is true, it is not the case to the claim that they missed places, rather, the Kenya University and Colleges Central Placement Services says the students opted for diploma courses in polytechnics and technical institutions.
When asked about this, KUCCPS chief executive John Muraguri said: “This was a deliberate choice, remember, universities declared a higher number of capacity than the number of students who qualified to join the institutions so it will be misleading to say that some students missed places.”
Out of 689,007 students who sat for the 2019 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination, only 125,463 students who attained mean grades of C+ were eligible for placement to university as government-sponsored students.
So too, John Muraguri, the KUCCPS chief executive also notes that the government does not fund education for non-Kenyan nationalities.
This means that those who are not Kenyan students also missed university places.
They, however, are eligible to apply to various institutions as private international students.
“We also did not consider students who are not Kenyans, the government only funds Kenyans and the simple explanation is that the government is training human resources thus wouldn’t want to lose those it trains because they are foreigners,” Muraguri said in a phone conversation.
Institutions of higher learning charge this kind of student at different rates compared to Kenyan nationalities.
This story was produced by The Star in partnership with Code for Africa’s iLAB data journalism programme, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie.
