Privatisation and Private Higher Education in Kenya. Implications for Access, Equity and Knowledge Production: Implications for Access, Equity and Knowledge Production

1 - Introduction and Background to the Study

1 Introduction and Background to the Study Introduction The emergence of private higher education in most of Africa in the last two decades has been one of the remarkable transformations related to the provision of higher education in the continent. In the main, the private higher education sector is small compared to traditional public provision. The forces that have led to the emergence of the sector in the continent are two-fold. Internally has been increasingly demand that the weak economies of African countries were unable to finance through public provision. At the international level, economic globalisation necessitated liberalisation of social service provision in individual countries and the subjection of demand and supply of such services to market logics. Higher education in Africa has increasingly been subjected to this market logic. This study analyses how the developments are affecting higher education provision in Kenya in respect to equity and knowledge production. These two tasks have traditionally been critical mandates that higher education was to contribute towards their achievement. The scope of the study is limited to the university sector of higher education. This sector has not only been the dominant, but also new entrants are exclusively interested in offering university level programmes. The study is presented in five sections. Section one conceptualises private higher education within the current discourse and then analyses the push factors for privatisation and private higher education in developing countries. The research issues that these developments have posed to higher education in Africa generally and Kenya in particular are raised within the context of this study. The second section reviews and profiles the evolution and historical development of private higher education in Kenya. Section three and four respectively analyse the effects of privatisation and private higher education on equity issues and research in Kenya. The last section discusses some challenges and prospects related to the growth of privatisation and private higher education in Kenya. 2 Privatisation and Private Higher Education in Kenya Conceptual and theoretical issues in privatisation and private higher education In both the developed and developing countries, a new paradigm in the offering of higher education emerged from the 1980s. The emergence of the new paradigm was closely linked to a changed policy environment at a global level where government as the guarantor of public interest ceded control and ownership of capital to the private sector. Higher education was conceived crucial both in energising the transition from a public to a private sector-driven economy and in terms of producing the human capital required to consolidate the process. Before this paradigm change, higher education provision in most of the world was a public concern, in terms of both financing and function. Conceived as a post-war development strategy, countries continued to spend huge financial outlays in higher education systems to produce the human capital required for reconstruction. For example, up to the 1980s, 95 percent and 80 percent of students in Western Europe and the United States attended public universities respectively, while in Africa and Asia, public provision still continue to dominate the university sector (Varghese 2004). The coupling together of the processes towards privatisation of public capital enterprises and higher education has altered the core focus of the mandates of higher education institutions. While the post war imperatives on which universities laid claim to public resources required that they execute their mandates in response to the needs of the wider public, privatisation requires that universities respond to the skill needs of private firms and individuals. This has been captured in the pressure for universities to teach ‘market driven courses’. Such demands have led to changes in the traditional liberal curricula of universities. Skills in Business Administration and Information Technology have been the most sought-after, making universities compete for students in these areas, to the disregard of skill needs in other areas like medicine where developing countries face critical human capital shortages. In most of Africa, the growth of privatisation and private higher education has been more a response to the global pressures than tangible internal policy forecasting to embrace private higher education. The pressures of globalisation and the inclusion of higher education in the World Trade Organisation’s list of tradable goods target to open higher education markets in developing countries to strong established providers from the developed countries. Whereas higher education institutions in developing countries cannot compete with those of the developed countries in terms of the investments needed to make their higher education systems attract international students, the entry of...