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| University education is out of touch with the reality |
As a university scholar and teacher, I have personally witnessed many cases of mismatch between universities’ approach to teaching and what industry requires of a university graduate.
I grew up in a small village in Western Kenya where university graduates were not as common as they are nowadays. That was the mid 80s. Since then things have changed. Universities are now income-generating ventures whose primary objective is no longer provision of quality scholars but to make money at the expense of the learner. The situation is even worse in many private universities.
There are several reasons why university education is seen to be out of touch with reality: First, the research which is a product of the universities is hardly consumed by the intended users of the findings which includes the Government, the business community as well as the wider society. In this era where information and communication technology is an integral part of everything, the focus of research among other things should be directed towards adopting emerging technologies. This should be accompanied by adoption of primary technologies in this field of ICT as the only way to become fully industrialized by 2030.
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Still on the research front, the academic researches being churned yearly from universities are immense but such works are often left to gather dust on the shelves of the university libraries. Apart from being published in revered journals and earning one a master’s degree or doctorate, there is no other useful application, commercial or otherwise. Such academic papers will only be useful as long as all the stakeholders of the research are involved in the consumption of the research findings.
There have been many occasions where the general public has raised the alarm over the relevance of university education compared to what employers require. Many a time, employers have preferred diploma graduates than degree holders in similar jobs. This is partly true owing to the partial or complete lack of training facilities especially laboratory equipment for the key technical areas in the universities.
Many universities in Kenya are busy producing graduates in Engineering, Sciences and related courses without having a single modern equipment in their laboratories or only having a handful of dilapidated often equipment of outdated technology. The issue is not lack of funding alone but is due to a number of other reasons: Corruption, carefree attitudes by technicians, lack of knowledge about modern technologies among a plethora of other reasons.
Lack of proper mechanisms for university –industry linkages are also to blame. Whilst the Kenya Government has been in the forefront in the recent past by introducing compulsory and paid internships for the college and university students, attachment cannot be the only solution. Why not also attach university lecturers who do not have industry background?. Is the Government required through the Ministry of Education or individual colleges/universities to prepare a special curriculum guide for industrial attachments? In addition, one thing that is lacking in Kenya is where the Government has failed to completely implement the primary manufacturing model in Kenya.
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The university graduates we send out to the market every year especially engineers seem to be misplaced, so to speak. Whereas universities train qualified mechanical design and production engineers, there is no machine to design,so our engineers end up as maintenance technicians. In fact one cannot realize the difference between an engineer and a technologist, a technologist and a technician, a technician and an artisan.
The writer , Soita Juma, is a PhD student in Business Administration at the University of Nairobi with major in Operations and Technology Management. He is an Assistant Lecturer of Operations and Supply Chain Management with the Technical University of Kenya and the University of Nairobi.
By Soita Justus Juma
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