A shameless case for teaching 'unmarketable' varsity courses

One of the most exaggerated notions we had as children was that of university education. Back then, universities were just a handful - University of Nairobi, Egerton, Moi, Kenyatta University, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and Maseno. Of course there were polytechnics and other colleges, but these rated a rung lower. You see, only about 10,000 ended up as State-sponsored ‘campus students’ in the country, or so our romantic view of higher learning had us believe.

The really good ones got scholarships to study abroad, and were held in cult-like esteem if they ever returned. A graduate’s bar views were regarded with awe. You could have been an anthropology freshman, but your views on the weather were the official meteorological report across many ridges. Actually, if a graduate lost his brains to illegal smokables, the village would excuse his new cabbage status as the effect of reading too many books.

Before joining university, the crème de la crème went to the National Youth Service. Here, they got military training and had discipline drilled into their otherwise riotous minds. In our hypnotised minds however, we believed the students learnt the most jealously guarded ‘state secrets’. We also heard rosy but obviously garnished tales of how university students got State largesse that went by the term ‘boom’.

The chief source of envy for me were the two-speaker, double-deck cassette players. Every university student had one. Some carried them around the village, alongside a whole mountain of cassette tapes, which they used to fast-forward or rewind by twirling the thing around a biro pen. There was also their command of the English language, which they wowed us with as they gallivanted around village paths.

Today, the magic of university is all but gone. It started with the introduction of the parallel degree programme. While the so-called module 2 programme helped many people access higher education, it opened the floodgates to commercialisation of learning. So much that today, employers are losing faith in degree certificates. Even master’s degree holders, and these are not my views, have to be subjected to basic English and on-the-job tests; you can’t quite be sure! Ever since ‘tough courses’ stopped being a preserve of high-intelligence-quotient learners, we have had serious quality issues. True, the regulators have done a good job, but you can only do so much when a C-minus holder is allowed to study medicine after a few bridging courses.

Put more bluntly, the itch to expand and own concrete-and-steel property seems to have shifted the focus from quality of learning to numbers and impressive figures. So much that universities today have marketers like fast consumer goods and students are more of clients than seekers of knowledge about the universe. Don’t get me wrong. I know expanding facilities has a direct bearing on quality, but you just need to see how much the fast-expanding outfits allocate to research and books to get my point.

There is also a tendency to drop literature, sociology, economics, philosophy and other ‘traditional’ courses that are ‘unmarketable’, as someone told me recently. Yet these are some of the disciplines that impart the kind of critical thinking that humanises society, hence the term humanities. Today they scoff at anthropology, which basically helps us understand who we are, and glorify single-issue disciplines that should essentially add up to not-more-than three points on a transcript.

The rush for courses tailor-made for specific departments in a company fits in well with our get-rich-quick mentality. But it flies in the face of the need to impart skills like strategy and critical thinking, which help us solve solutions and adapt to a world in a dizzying state of flux. As for me, it was better when they taught ‘unmarketable’ courses.