Choosing degree and diploma courses is probably one of the first consequential challenge for young adults who have just graduated from secondary schools. Lasting about two months, the courses application and revision present one of the most delicate processes going by the number of players it attracts.
Here is the dilemma: Because of weak career guidance in school or at home, learners are left between a rock and a hard place not knowing what to study and how to marry their dreams to the realities of the economy.
Every application cycle, the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) repeats that peer pressure and parental maneuvers are forcing Form Four leavers into professions that they did not dream of joining, thus ruining their careers and nation building endeavors.
Choose your own path, KUCCPS chief executive, Dr Mercy Wahome, said this week at webinar on the ongoing applications that will close on May 6. The process opened on April 7, exposing the applicants and their circles to a game of chess as they search for programmes that will miraculously usher them into the land of milk and honey. It’s the search for ‘marketable courses’.
While sons and daughters will struggle to complete the ‘marketable courses’ forced on them, parents are wont to complain about difficult “my difficult child” studied a course that give them no edge at all.
Because of this, parents’ guide or ‘force’ their kin to study certain courses because the latter know little about their course preferences and can’t go beyond saying how a programme or an institution is “prestigious”. Parents, out of love and/or experience want to see their footprints in the course or profession the young ones join.
According to Dr Wahome, applicants should pursue the bigger picture instead of following prestige blindly in the name of a course or a university, while ignoring a diploma programme that dovetails with their professional dreams.
She adds that while new programmes were coming up and challenges facing economies were getting more complex requiring different approaches and specialisations, parents were stuck to traditional gems of teaching and health courses.
Indeed health and teaching sectors are some of the most vibrant, knowing that people will always seek education; they will always seek medical attention. It’s this school of thought that has hoisted nursing, placing it on a possible unfailing and glittering pedestal.
About two months ago, Prof John Oluoch, the placement agency’s head of career development, said parents, their sons and daughters were known to engage in “a cat and mouse” game in the ‘marketable courses’ race.
Prof Oluoch painted a possibility of parents and their children oscillating between courses throughout the application period, depending on who was in control of the applicant’s password.
At a careers conference in Nairobi, he advised families to strike a compromise on the courses to pick instead of the back-and-forth that has seen many “study for dad and mum” only to deposit a degree certificate at home before embarking on the search for their dream courses.
Parents are looking at what will employ the graduate while he/she is following their heart or passion. Well, those following their passions need to listen to Cal Newport, who says in his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You that passion comes second to deliberate effort, grit, or deep work.
However, because of the lackluster career guidance in schools, Form Four graduates struggle through the months of application and revision, juggling their dream courses, what parents and guardians want, and what friends and teachers are whispering in their ears.
In the 2025 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination, 993,226 sat for the test. Of these, 270,715, including non-Kenyans qualified for direct university entry by attaining the minimum C+ grade.
