How to produce a half-baked varsity degree in Kenya

Moi University Vice-Chancellor Prof Richard Mibey during a press conference at the institution's main campus in Uasin Gishu County on April 8, 2015. The university had been ordered to shut down its law school for it does not meet the standard requirements. Universities should ideally be places of intellectual isolation but not factories for producing sausage-like labour. PHOTO | JARED NYATAYA | NATION MEDIA GROUP 

In Summary

• They say many fresh graduates do not have the required skills, cannot think analytically or write coherently.
• You don’t expect students who scored C-pluses not to sit in the same class as A-minuses — especially if the latter are paying their own way through the parallel degree programme.
• Universities should ideally be places of intellectual isolation, reflection and introspection — not factories for producing sausage-like labour.

By KWAMCHETSI MAKOKHA
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Universities are neither bakeries nor kitchens. They are not even ovens, given the cool-headedness required to teach and learn in them.

Still, employers, regulators and other important people have started a new chorus of complaints about half-baked lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers and other serious professionals.

Now that the World Bank has added its alto to the refrain, we are going to face the music.

They say many fresh graduates do not have the required skills, cannot think analytically or write coherently. Their English is bad — but they have not tested them in Sheng, unaware that many dispensed with the burden of language and went straight to fixing the ills of society.

Since Kenya started increasing access to education, focus on skills for entering the job market was lost temporarily.

INEPT GRADUATES
Employers across the region — using horizontal interviews, blood ties, whom-do-you-know, and the good old backhander — now keep finding the graduates they interview and hire unable to do the job.

Every graduate must be able to perform to the same level — especially since employers are so focused on merit and equal opportunity that they only give opportunities for internship to the deserving.

Either students pass through the school system like beans through a gringo or the quality ones join university in their thousands and emerge after four years of study having completely sloughed off any grammar and unable to construct a correct sentence in English.

Such is the respect for the students’ linguistic integrity that universities refuse to interfere in their refusal to be bound by the rules of foreign language grammar.

Modern-day graduates can design bridges; create mobile money transfer solutions and appreciate the law, but they still need translators to interpret their genius to the world.

You don’t expect students who scored C-pluses not to sit in the same class as A-minuses — especially if the latter are paying their own way through the parallel degree programme.

Students are mixed like batter, integrated and encouraged to discover great things. University is not a kindergarten; so those with learning difficulties must fend for themselves.

When their lecturers start singing Solidarity Forever, the employers remind them about how badly the economy is doing.

HASTY LEARNING

Majority of the lecturers teach subjects other than those they graduated in an effort to encourage them to read widely – or they would be holding forth using the same yellowed notes and rehearsed power-point presentations they prepared years in advance.

This method of instruction prevents students’ heads from filling up with useless old knowledge until there is no space for new ideas.

Obviously, the pressure to obtain degrees has driven some students into ingenuities like exchanging sex for grades, hiring lecturers to write their term papers, and outright cheating.

In the end, there are so many degrees that finding the half-baked one is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. Demand is forcing degrees that are supposed to be completed in four years to be awarded after two years — if one chooses the crash programme and has the money for fees.

Universities should ideally be places of intellectual isolation, reflection and introspection — not factories for producing sausage-like labour. You remove a degree from the university environment too early, and you cannot be too certain it can be consumed immediately. It is the employers and regulators’ funeral.