University managers in Kenya have been pushing for a review of tuition fees for many years, but it has always been thwarted by student threats and chaos.
This time, however, the Treasury has backed them on proposals of tripling the fees to Sh48,000 a year, saying learners will get a raised bursary allocation.
As expected, students have opposed the plan, saying the move is ill-timed. Will it this time go past the proposals and endorsements?
Apart from the fact this tuition fees has remained unchanged since 1995 when the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) was formed, the public universities are broke and keep asking for more billions from the Treasury to no avail.
Inflationary pressures and thin allocations from the government against the fast-rising enrolment means that the calls for higher fees are not far-fetched.
Nonetheless, while university operations ought to continue, there is a need to worry about the learners getting value for money on the higher payments.
Again, it would be too harsh tripling the payments since even at the prevailing Sh16,000, a number of students are struggling to pay and stay on campus throughout the programme period.
On the dwindling government funding, there have been calls that universities come up with programmes that will generate income while ensuring that quality isn’t compromised.
Parallel programmes (Module II) that were crafted were a good money-making plan, but harmed the economy, supplying a huge number of graduates without the power to read and do all in their areas of study. Module II programmes made worse the shame of half-baked graduates.
Before raising tuition fees, can the universities try measures like going leaner by closing campuses across the country and East Africa? It would also be meaningful withdrawing State-sponsored students from private universities who were sent there due to limited capacity at a time national exam cheating raised the number qualifying for degree studies.
That huge number ended with the tightening of exams administration, and, so, all students could be comfortably accommodated at the public universities.
But, more importantly, how will the students paying higher fees be useful to the economy?
Authorities such as Richard Bailey, a highly esteemed scholar who is recognised for his views on contemporary issues on education, observes that economies are now knowledge-based and higher learning institutions have a bigger role to play in national development.
In fact, nations look to knowledge churned from university to turn the turbines of economic growth, sustainable development and ensure global competitiveness.
Andrew Gunn, a researcher in higher education policy at Leeds University in the UK, thinks that increasing university fees is inevitable in the quest for reforms in higher education that ensure industrial renaissance as outlined in Kenya’s Vision 2030.
The envisaged re-engineering of quality requires increased funding for university programmes, but it should not lock out anyone from achieving their dreams.
Therefore, the society should commit to financially support students since the HELB funding has not been adequate and there is a category of students that cannot survive without State funding. This means HELB should get increased funding as a formula for tapping a wide pool of talent from across the country.
In the UK, they increase university fees under “Inflation Linked Fee Rise”. The Secretary of State for education said the rise would come with structural adjustments, key among them improving the quality of teaching. Some university rankings have found British universities losing shine due to the reduced interaction between the faculty members and students.
In response, the UK formed a Teaching Excellence Framework to measure and improve student experience and teaching quality.
Universities ought to measure their influence tied to quality of teaching instead of the business-as-usual performance by lecturers who keep missing classes and take years to supervise graduate studies, some delays to successful legal suits.
Any rise in university fees should thus be tied to performance index by each university, the course, and year of study. For example, medical and engineering courses would require slightly higher fees.
Student-teacher contact hours, teacher-student ratio, and student satisfaction are some of the yard sticks that can be used to measure performance index.
Therefore, tuition fee increases should not just based on inflation but also on targets, performance, and delivery.
The Ministry of Education can do this through an elaborate consultation with other stakeholders such as Parliament. It shouldn’t be left in the hands of university and the Treasury, the latter under pressure to increase funding to the learning institutions.
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