Auctioning education is a disgrace

Okech Kendo

There were times when education was the surest way of breaking the social chain of poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance.

Of course, others have broken the chain in other ways, like through marriage into economically correct families, crime, and corruption. But the honest way of climbing the social ladder was always through a good formal education that guarantees a livelihood.

It is the right education that defines whether one heads to the alleys of city slums or middle-class neighbourhoods, then graduating to better places, with time and hard work.

Personal will to succeed was what one needed most to break the vicious circle of class bar. But an enabling environment has also been an essential precondition for social and economic breakthrough.

Not any more now that poor Kenyans are once again being locked out of the future thanks to ‘commercialisation’ of education, and the heavy financial costs that come with an avalanche of ‘parallel’ degrees.

A good example of the side effects of the outbreak of ‘parallel degrees’ is the devaluation of a degree in law. This is not the same degree some shining Kenyans studied for 20 years ago at the only local university offering the course then.

Although it is still a bachelor of laws degree it is one of a lower quality, and constantly dropping value, even as the cost of studying for it gets higher. When times were good Kenya School of Law admitted less than 50 students at a cost to the taxpayer. Now it admits about 700. In mid-1990s a fee of Sh25,000 was imposed per year.

Today, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Moi University, Kenyatta University, Catholic University of Eastern Africa, among others, including backstreet ones, are offering law studies. Others pursue law on-line.

Highest bidder

The influx has seen Kenya School of Law charge Sh7,500 tuition fee per course from 2006, which shot to Sh10,00 last year.

In 2007, local students from foreign universities paid Sh97,000 and locals Sh45,000 tuition. This cost is still rising, as exclusion of those who cannot pay begin to worry.

Those who can, now buy education even without standards. But the auctioning of education, particularly at the universities, to the highest bidder, is sidelining students from poor families. Cash for degrees is subverting the will to succeed through a good education.

Through education alone, to the highest level one’s intellect would allow, a peasant’s son or daughter could become someone, a role model of sorts, even for a poor village.

Education, affordable and subsidised or free, from primary, through to secondary school alone, was Kenya’s version of the clichÈd ‘American Dream’.

The ‘Dream’ has seen a black son of a single white mother, and an estranged black father, become the President of the US. But the ‘Dream’ did not start with the current US President. The son of our land is a beneficiary of a heritage of a country where hard work still pays.

Hard work and will to succeed did pay off for the 16th president of the United States Abraham Lincoln. Born in a log cabin in poor America, a hewer of wood and fetcher of water, Lincoln had a singular will to excel.

It was him who is remembered for saying, "Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing."

Barack Obama did not become the President of the US in 2008 because Americans wanted such novelty or a person of colour in the White House. The man has an excellent education from Harvard, gift of the garb, complete with turn of phrase, substance, and a personal drive to break the chains that held back his race for generations.

Obama climbed those mountains and jumped over the hurdles because he had role models and an enabling environment. Black pioneer and civil rights leader Martin Luther was one such force of history that drove Obama to dream big because he had the will, and the wherewithal, to carry through the shattered ambitions of his own father and grand father. A colonial chief drove out Obama’s paternal grandfather from his home in Karachuonyo, and frustrations drove Obama’s father to death.

Shattered ambitions

But Obama’s is not just the case of another black man driving through the dreams of another black man. There was also white man, a son of a slave rider, Lincoln, behind President Obama’s inspiration.

Self-educated Lincoln drove himself from the alleys of poverty to become the president of the United States. He educated himself by reading borrowed books, believing the written word could open up a whole new world for him. It did at the right time.

Today the high cost of education is denying poor Kenyans the chance to break through. Auctioning education to the highest bidder could be a conspiracy against the poor.