15,000 students yet to apply for University placement have until Saturday

Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) CEO Dr. Mercy Wahome. [Boniface Okendo, Standard]

More than 15,000 students who qualified for university admission have not submitted their applications, the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) Chief Executive Mercy Wahome has said.

In a statement dated Wednesday, July 6, KUCCPS said a total of 157,498 students who attained a mean grade of C+ and above have applied, out of the 173,127 who qualified for university admission. 

KUCCPS says the application portal will close on Saturday, July 8. Those yet to apply can do so by then.

“As the final selection phase gets underway, previous applicants can confirm if they have secured a course by checking if their student’s portal displays a message indicating if they have secured a chance provisionally or not," Wahome stated. 

“Any candidate who has secured a provisional placement is not required to reapply. Those who have secured courses should wait for KUCCPS to complete the placement process after which they will be provided with details of their courses and institutions, by September 2023,” said KUCCPS.

Due to competition in some courses, KUCCPS further said that some applicants did not qualify since the placement is done on merit.

“I have observed that a lot of students are still fixated with the traditional degree courses like medicine, which cannot accommodate all the qualified students applying for them,” said Dr. Mercy Wahome, the KUCCPS Chief Executive Officer. 

For example, Wahome stated, public universities provided a total of five hundred and twenty-three(523) slots in Medicine, Pharmacy, and Nursing degree courses. 

These courses, she says, filled up at the first phase of course selection, due to the large number of qualified students who applied for them.

In the 2022 KCSE, some 1,156 candidates attained A, while 6,658 students scored A – (minus) and 15,938 got B+. Therefore, a total of 23,752 students scored top grades and qualified for the courses.

 “From the numbers, it is obvious that a student with A – (minus) or B+ is unlikely to get Medicine or any of the other competitive courses,” said Wahome.

 “However, this does not lock them from enrolling in these courses as module II students," she added.