By Wachira Kigotho

In the last two decades, access to higher education has widened in Kenya allowing many young people to fulfil their ambitions of getting a university degree.

Basically this has been occasioned by the rapid expansion of both public and private higher education systems that encompass seven public universities with nine constituent colleges and 23 private universities with varying degrees of recognition. Besides there are satellite campuses established by public and private universities as well as academic garages operated by middle-level local and foreign commercial colleges.

But despite these options, issues of fair access ring bells of inequality. According to the Association for the Advancement of Higher Education and Development, entry to university education is dependent on a student’s socio–economic background.

"At the University of Nairobi, about 84 per cent of students come from high income potential areas and only 0.5 per cent of total female students come from arid and semi-arid areas," says Ms Anne Marea-Griffin, the Executive Director of AHEAD. Available information indicates those statistics are replicated in the rest of the public universities.

The issue is that entrance to higher education in Kenya as elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa is fundamentally determined by access to quality secondary education. Subsequently, most students selected by the central body, the Joint Admissions Board, to join public universities as regular students, are from high quality secondary schools that over the years have been dominated by pupils from high cost private primary schools.

According to Prof A Kasozi, the Executive Director of Uganda’s National Council for Higher Education, children of wealthy social groups have the advantage of attending the best kindergartens, primary and secondary institutions and hence make good grades.

Ground breaking

"These institutions have facilities needed for making good grades required for entry to tertiary institutions and even earning merit government sponsorship," says Prof Kasozi.

In a groundbreaking study, Whose children attend university and are paid for by the State in East Africa? Kasozi shatters the myth that most students in public universities come from poor families whose children are unable to contribute to the cost of their education. He concludes that education in the region is consumed by children of the rich.

In essence, inequalities in Kenya have been bolstered by intensive privatisation of higher education in public universities through parallel programmes that enable high school graduates with barely minimum entry grades of C+ to seek admission on ability to pay. In addition, universities have also ventured into pre-university training, a cash cow project that offers bridging courses to students without minimum entry grades.

Commenting on the two programmes, higher education Assistant Minister Kilemi Mwiria faults marketisation of higher education in the public universities, as a process that was providing unequal advantage to students having limited economic barriers. Mwiria seems to agree with Kasozi that the majority of the current crop of university students is from high-income groups, from prosperous districts and from the best secondary schools.

According to Prof Pundy Pillay, participation in higher education is also skewed in favour of urban and metropolitan areas. "Students from rural households face enormous challenges accessing higher education in general and higher quality higher education institutions in particular," says Pillay, a leading economics of education specialist at University of Western Cape in South Africa and a World Bank consultant on education.

In a recent study, Challenges and Lessons of Higher Education from East and Southern Africa, Pillay underpins importance of one’s socio economic status and region of origin, as deciding factors to accessing university education. "These factors determine access to quality secondary education and eventually to better quality higher education," says Prof Pillay in the report published by the Centre for International Higher Education.

Interestingly, even in situations when a person from a disadvantaged economic background has been admitted as a regular student in a public university, issues of fair access does not automatically balance on matters related to degree choice.

After high school

For instance a student from a poor household with a mean score of A- in the KCSE on could be admitted to a public university to study for a BSc (Ethnobotany) or BSc (Ecotourism and Hospitality) — though his or her interest was medicine or law — while a counterpart from a wealthy background with a mean score of B+ could readily study for MBChB or LLB degrees through the parallel programmes.

Parents with ability to pay have been encouraging their children to join universities the following year after high school, rather than waiting for selection by the JAB in a process that takes more than a year after KCSE results are out. There is also evidence that some parents are advising their children to reject Jab offers of engineering courses that are not recognised by Engineering Registration Board and urging them to apply for placement in parallel programmes in universities where their degree choices are validated.

Even then, inequality in access to higher education seems to have affected women more than men. Whereas there is steady rise on women entering general sciences and medicine, their participation in engineering and technology degree courses is minimal.

According to the Unesco, marked inequalities in higher education in Kenya exist between sexes, urban and rural areas.

Although experts are concerned about disparities in higher education, the crux of the matter is that schooling has failed to narrow the gap. The issue is that children from poor backgrounds and most disadvantaged homes attend the lowest performing primary and secondary schools and subsequently achieve the poorest academic outcomes.

Besides, posting low academic outcomes is not just a sure way of being locked out of universities and other tertiary institutions but educational failure is a ticket to restricted life chances and personal ambitions.