DEGREES THAT DONT

The nascent academic capitalism in Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming the ugly face of education, with universities side-stepping quality and effectively locking out students from developing rewarding careers.
According to Dr Carol Bidemi, an expert on higher education, aggressive marketing of university degrees has taken priority against quality teaching and research in order to harness finances to fuel university growth.
Bidemi argues market values have permeated at all levels of higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa, undermining traditional roles and missions of universities.
"None of this augurs well for a public good construction of higher education," says Bidemi, who has written extensively on marketing of higher education in East Africa.
In the context of diminished Government support for higher education, entrepreneurial strategies have been embraced but with drastic consequences of academic erosion in addition to attracting students of low academic achievement.
"Although the goal was to raise additional funds for the universities, the process has altered the behavior of individuals and groups within and outside the university," says Bidemi.
Amid efforts to attract students, universities started competing against each other and forgot their original mission, distorting their areas of academic excellence.
Almost all universities created new undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes, even as they lacked capacity in terms of lecturers and physical facilities. To look attractive, degrees were re-branded and given new names.
For instance, secretarial, catering and hospitality courses were given a facelift and became degrees, while diploma courses traditionally offered in vocational colleges and medium-level business colleges found new homes and new status in universities.
However, the most tragic was in the field of engineering where some public universities in their quest to be attractive started courses without sufficient planning and without adequate human resources and facilities. The outcome has been costly to students, whom after five years of study, realise they cannot be considered for registration as engineers.
There are questions as to why some universities went ahead to admit students even after knowing degrees they offer could not be accredited by the Engineering Registration Board (ERB).
So far, there are 47 engineering degree programmes not accredited by ERB for various reasons. According to an ERB report on accreditation of the engineering degree courses, most programmes were rejected for inadequate curriculum.
Others were rejected for using non-engineers to teach engineering courses. For instance, one university offering a Bachelor of Science (Civil and Structural Engineering), has 11 lecturers but only one is a registered engineer. In that university, some engineering course units are taught by geologists, surveyors and home economists.
Another university offering a degree related to civil engineering has no engineer in a department of 10 lecturers.
"Since there is no civil engineering department, why is a programme in water and environment engineering being introduced before one in civil engineering?" poses ERB report.
According to ERB, the university in question should have established a fully-fledged department of civil engineering offering broad-based undergraduate degrees in civil engineering.
"Starting with a specialised discipline when the resources required for a less specialized one is not available, is not a prudent move," says ERB. Such are some of the problems confronting engineering students whose degrees have not been accredited by the board.
Accredited degreesSome Egerton University graduates have gone to court, seeking orders to compel ERB and the university to find ways of having their degrees accredited.
In the last few weeks, engineering students of Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology have been on strike urging the university to meet ERB�s accreditation criteria.
But as students struggle to have their degrees accredited, universities are at pains to take responsibility and explain why they teach courses that do not meet set standards.
The crux of the matter is that whereas students desire to study for professional degrees, universities have a moral duty to explain career paths of the degrees they offer.
Elsewhere, universities place information on their websites as to whether a specific degree programme is accredited by the local professional authority.
Such is the case in Britain, US, Australia, Japan and South Africa, where universities are required to reveal accreditation status of their professional degrees.
Surprisingly, the Government has not acted fast. So far, the country has only 1,200 registered engineers despite a raft of engineering degree programmes offered in public universities.
Nola Dihel, a labor specialist at the World Bank, says density of engineering professionals has been on a downward trend as professional education is expensive.
Considering that the Government is the main sponsor of students in public universities who join through the Joint Admissions Board, there is need for audit of professional degree programmes in public universities.
Many agree it would be foolhardy to arm-twist ERB to accredit engineering programmes that cannot withstand scrutiny of quality.