Universities’ financial crises signal need for reforms

About 10 days ago, Vice Chancellors reported that Kenyan universities were in the grip of a financial crisis with fears that a looming shut-down is inevitable.

“We are waiting for the shutdown because the red line was long crossed, and all universities are operating in crisis,” Chair of Vice Chancellors Committee Prof Francis Aduol was quoted.

This was not shocking, but it was probably the first time the university bosses have been most upfront of a crisis that has been around for the past five years.

However, it was curious to read what both the vice chancellors and the Education CS cited as the origins, and the probable solutions, to what is obviously a crisis that is understated. 

The VCs cited high fees charged by regulators as one of the reasons for the crisis, coupled with low tuition charged per student, low capitation, and a reduction of students’ enrolment following examinations reforms.

The response from the State, through CS Amina Mohammed, was equally underwhelming, and failed to dispel mounting fears that the Jubilee government is oblivious of what is happening in our universities. Ms Mohammed brushed aside VCs concerns, suggesting that they should instead cut admissions of students and offer only those programmes that they can adequately mount. She gave the beleaguered VCs two weeks to come up with a report that should be submitted to the Cabinet for possible approval. 

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Between the lamentations of the VCs and the minister's simplistic approach, a pattern of both indifference and insincerity toward higher education was impossible to miss. But the reality of a financial crisis in the universities is almost always a daily part of Kenyan news. A few weeks ago, Kenyatta University pleaded for a government bailout on a Chinese funded project in their campus. Recently, Egerton was in the news following the seizure of vehicles by a court appointed auctioneer.

Cases of salary delays are now accepted as part of the routines of being a university employee. Third party payments, a legal requirement, are no longer being made.

Conveyor-belt system

Loan repayments are in arrears for thousands of university employees. Banks no longer extend credit facilities to university employees with many of them listed in the Credit Reference Bureau for no fault of their own. 

Meanwhile, the university mission to produce and disseminate knowledge has become a luxury, with everything reduced to the basics teaching, awarding marks and pushing each cohort of students in a conveyor belt of a degree producing system. Prof Aduol’s argument that university education will shut in one year is diplo-speak. University education in many campuses has long ceased to exist. 

This column has previously detailed the genesis of the financial crises currently affecting our universities and prescribed possible solutions out of this mess. For starters, universities must be extremely clear of their academic mission.

I have read previously that universities should innovate and think of ‘new’ ways of generating income. This might be helpful, but not unless the academic mission of our universities is restored. For any recovery effort, any bailout or funding plan to succeed, universities must first go to the old paths and restore their academic missions.

On its part, the State must think beyond myopic strategies of cuts and pointless debates such as those attempting to draw lines between arts and STEM programmes. Instead, it must support a deliberate effort of a funding model that primarily isolates research-intensive universities from teaching ones.

This decision might mean that some university campuses are merged to avoid unnecessary duplication and waste. 

The nature of university debt is so bad that only a government bailout will restore some semblance of normalcy. While a bailout is inevitable, it will require hard decisions from university managers. With three administrators for every academic, local universities are bloated, inefficient and expensive to sustain. Something must give. 

Also, the current governance models in universities predisposes them to become extremely expensive, yet unsustainable entities.

In an extremely heavily politicised mode of appointing VCs and their deputies such as ours, decisions of who is employed in these institutions and which campuses are open, is not a factor of actual needs but of short-term political expedience.

Mean funding

The chickens have since come home to roost, and the State cannot shirk the responsibility. For as long as the State prefers to tinker with senior university appointments, dole out council appointments and persist in ethnicising the academe, it must be ready to pick up the bill.

To their credit, the VCs highlighted the sorry state of capitation, which has barely changed since the early 90s. The current model of funding for each student is less than half of the actual cost of meaningfully sustaining them in campus. 

All these efforts must be properly guided by a higher education policy that provides guidelines on needs, welfare and funding for higher education. The state can no longer afford to operate as if universities in Kenya do not exist.

-The writer teaches at Moi University and is currently a British Academy Visiting Fellow, University of Cambridge.