UoN remains Kenya’s most competitive university getting the top KCSE students

By NYAMBEGA GISESA

Twitter: @Nyambega

The once prestigious degree of the “learned friends” is losing its glamour to courses like Fashion and Design in some public universities while Medicine is no longer the top degree option for students who perform best in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams.

Although 16 of the 20 best candidates in last year’s KCSE exams will be studying Medicine and Surgery, the lecture hall of Telecommunication and Information Engineering will have the brightest kids according to the Joint Admissions Board (JAB) data.

The Nairobian has broken down data from the JAB admission selection list and calculated the mean for Kenya’s highest ranked degrees according to clusters: Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (47.61 points) at the University of Nairobi (UoN) and Bachelor of Science Telecommunication and Information Engineering (47.11 points) at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT).

UoN’s Medicine class has a mean of 45.6373 based on cluster points for the whole class while JKUAT’s Telecommunication and Information Engineering records 45.67.

Surprisingly, the attraction of Actuarial Science, which in the mid 2000s outperformed Medicine as the top ranked degree choice, has gone down with the degree coming up at number 14 in our analysis.

The University of Nairobi remains Kenya’s most competitive university getting the best KCSE performers after having 22 of their degree courses ranked among the 50 most competitive degrees by candidates selection as their first preference.

Others in the top 50 are JKUAT (15), KU (10), Moi (6), and Egerton, Maseno, Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology and Technical University of Nairobi having one degree choice in the top 50.