President Kibaki is on a roll to seal up as many projects as possible before he walks into retirement. While most of these are infrastructure projects the field of education has not been left behind.

To date the success of Free Primary Education remains the most notable in his two terms at the helm of the country.

But now the Head of State plans to increase the number of public universities to 22 for a population of 40 million.

This is a huge number of state universities when compared to sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous country Nigeria. With a population of 160 million souls, the number of public universities in Nigeria even out at 72 (36 federal and 36 state).

While it is important to increase the number of public universities, there is a danger that quality will be sacrificed for the sake of numbers.

Already, there is concern that the more established public universities are struggling with accusations that they are producing half-baked graduates not aligned for the job market or to be self-employed.

Lecturers are poorly paid and overworked. At the same time, the introduction of the so-called parallel program has been heavily criticised for being poorly structured and for lowering the standards of learning.

Student-teacher ratio

The latter program has stretched the teaching capacity at the universities to breaking point, as there are not enough qualified lecturers.

But the death of research is the other reason for the drop in quality of teaching and programs public universities. In most of the top public universities in the world, research is what distinguishes them from the rest.

The teaching staff are encouraged to engage in research as part of their career progression plan and rewarded accordingly.

In Kenya, lecturers do not have the time to carry out research due to the disproportionate student-teacher ratio and grueling teaching schedules.

Because of the decline in qualitative research, the universities cannot get sufficient endowments to support such activities.

A vibrant research base helps universities adopt new technologies faster and ensures that their programs are attuned to the realities of the marketplace.  This in turn makes them more appealing to other universities keen on establishing partnerships for research.

This has also been reflected in their lowly placement in international rankings of public universities.

Failure to address this rot explains the mushrooming of private universities that charge a fortune to offer what their public counterparts cannot.

The dangers of such a system are evident in Uganda where some private universities rush to offer post-graduate programs even before graduating their first batch of students from programs they launched upon accreditation.

This is unfortunate since public universities should be citadels of quality and excellence, and should set the pace in terms of curriculum development and relevance.

Studies where local industry captains were questioned about graduates from Kenyan public universities have been particularly scathing.

A majority said the quality of graduates being churned out of these institutions are ill-equipped to be taken on board, even as management trainees. Even more worrying is that most lack even the rudimentary skills to try their hand in self-employment even as our labour market remains stagnant.

One of the goals of the Vision 2030 economic and social blueprint is to make Kenya an industrialised country. To do this, there must be balance between the number of universities and tertiary institutions that offer research-based technical programs.

The death of village polytechnics is a case in point.

Not all Form Four candidates who qualify can get admitted to public universities and therefore need a middle-level option.

One way out would be to have at least one well-funded technical college, rather than a university in every county to act as centres of excellence.

These would then be constituent colleges of various universities and be used to transfer much-needed skills and technologies to the grassroots labour market.

Graduates from such institutions can then enroll for degree programs in the mother campus and get credits for some of the core courses.

Such linkages would open up more avenues for research and attract sponsors for the same.