Vice-chancellors from various public universities in the country have called for urgent measures to address the current shortage of staff, financial crisis and low student intake currently affecting the institutions.
This emerged during the opening of a two day University leaders training workshop held at Lake Naivasha Simba Lodge and attended by nearly all the Vice-Chancellors in the country.
During the workshop, the dons noted that all the 74 universities had the capacity to enroll 160,000 students but only 90,000 would be admitted as many of students had failed to meet the cut-off grade.
Addressing the press during the meeting, Vice Chancellor Karatina University Professor Mucai Muchiri noted that nearly all the universities faced financial crisis.
He said that this had adversely affected and strained their services noting that they were keen to seek new sources of revenue generation.
“The financial crisis has been there since the government scrapped parallel module and we have been forced to seek alternative means of revenue,” he said.
The professor at the same time noted that the number of students seeking agricultural and natural resources courses was on the decline.
He said that this spelt doom for the country’s plan on food security and the Big Four Agenda as the students opted for other coursers in medicine and engineering.
“In two years we shall have a crisis in universities with the staff who have been training these courses facing lay-offs due to lack of students,” he said.
The CEO Commission of University Education Professor Mwenda Ntarangu attributed the drop in the number of students enrolling to universities to stringent KCSE marking.
He noted that in the past there irregularities in the national exams noting that this had been addressed leading to the drop in university intake.
“In the past the government used to fund universities but with the increase in the numbers it has been hard to sustain them financially leading to the current crisis,” he said.
The Director of Universities Darious Mogaka who was the guest of honor during the opening of the workshop admitted that the financial crisis was real in the universities.
“Since the government stopped funding universities there has been challenges and the way to handle this is to seek new sources of revenue collection,” he said.