In June, Cabinet Secretary George Magoha directed higher education players to put together proposals to rationalise universities and specifically deal with funding models and academic programmes.
The matter has since generated heated debate with university administrators stridently opposing the proposal for mergers and shutdowns. The regulator, the Commission for University Education, is yet to give its proposals.
This month, the universities will be admitting freshers mainly through government sponsorship, itself a positive spin-off from the crackdown on exam cheating at high school since numbers have gone down.
Just about 90,000 candidates qualified in last year’s Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination and, subsequently, all placed at the public universities.
The critical debate in university education is viability and sustainability.
Exponential expansion of universities in the past two decades served to increase access to higher education, giving opportunity to many deserving people to acquire new qualifications.
Significantly, universities could raise new revenues that helped in infrastructure upgrade as government remissions declined.
But the whole experiment went overboard. Commercial interest and political influence came into play and created a crisis.
Too many universities and colleges were established which, rather than transit into new horizons, ended up offering repetitive courses and hardly expanded frontiers of knowledge.
The downside to it was that universities competed for the few available lecturers. Two, they produced excess graduates, especially in humanities, amid diminished job opportunities, catalysing an unemployment crisis.
With the benefit of hindsight, university growth must now be planned and organised.
Creation of new universities or degree programmes ought to be driven by demands.
Duplicated courses and programmes have to go, especially as universities are struggling to offer them but without creating value.
Political meddling that turned some universities into ethnic enclaves also has to end.
Vice chancellors and the lecturers’ union are opposed to mergers or shutdowns, principally because of self-interest, mainly loss of jobs and perks.
Inevitably, the current model of uncontrolled expansion, declining quality and ballooning costs is unsustainable.
However, what is required is a comprehensive review of university education in its entirety and charting out a new path.
Funding, academic programmes and management, among others, should be critically reviewed and tough decisions made.
For instance, the proposal to revise the funding formula to adopt a unit cost instead of uniform fee structure should be debated.
Prof Magoha has to push for the conclusion of the consultations and give new direction on university education.
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