What does the rise and decline of STEM enrollment in Kenyan universities tell us about the Kenyan economy?
A pitch to increase STEM enrollment (and fix higher education in Kenya)
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I: The share of university students enrolled in engineering has been in decline for 60 years
In the early 1960s the share of Kenyan university students enrolled in STEM subjects was 14.5%. By 1970 the share had increased to 49.9%, before peaking at 57.6% in 1981. However due to the expansion of the University of Nairobi (and the creation of new universities), by 1991 STEM enrollment had declined to 17.3% of students, before rising marginally to 23.2% in 2001. Then came over two decades of dizzying massification of enrollment in which the number of enrolled university students increased from about 50,000 to more than 450,000. This shift saw the STEM share shrink to just under 12%.
Why did enrollment explode after 2010? For two main reasons. First, the spike in enrollment mirrored the successes of access to basic education in the previous decade. Second, for mostly political reasons related to the pressures of high graduates in need of university placement, the government ended up converting several polytechnics and vocation schools into universities. It’s also worth noting that the beginning of the upward trend in the late 1990s was due to the introduction of Module II (parallel) programs in 1998/1999, whereby additional paying students were recruited in parallel to the state-sponsored “regular” students. Four years in the self-sponsored private students covered 20% of the university budget.
Before proceeding further it’s worth asking, what’s the optimal STEM share of students in enrolled in higher education? To be honest, it’s hard to tell. However, a comparative look around the world reveals that having a reasonable share of STEM enrollment — especially in engineering — boosts a country’s growth prospects. For example, the mode in Southeast Asia is above 30%. India stands at 34%. China, a developmental superstar, is at over 45%. I should add that these countries aren’t just about enrollment. They also invest heavily in research, which presumably improves the quality of STEM education in their universities. Informed by this comparative perspective, it is fair to say that there is such a thing as ranking too low on the share of STEM students enrolled in universities. Consequently, I would argue that Kenya’s share (12%) is too low.
That said, this post isn’t meant to suggest that non-STEM fields are useless (as some have erroneously suggested). In fact, I would argue that every university graduate needs meaningful exposure to the liberal arts. Furthermore, I think that the problems bedeviling STEM in Kenyan universities (especially the decline in quality of instruction and poor job prospects) also extend to non-STEM fields. Which is to say that to the extent that we see students gravitating to the latter it could simply be a function of the fact that, compared to STEM, it is relatively cheaper to scale instruction in those fields and therefore attract higher enrollment.
It would certainly be interesting to survey students on what they prefer to study versus what their grades, perceived job market prospects, and/or availability of slots may have forced them into.
Presently, the three leading areas of study at Kenya’s universities are business, education (teacher training), and the arts. Engineering comes next, with the rest of STEM scattered across fields like medicine, mathematics, physical sciences, public health and the like. It’s worth noting that several of the “STEM” degrees listed by the Commission on University Education (CUE) should more accurately be defined as “stem adjacent.” Many of these courses exhibit a non-standard understanding of STEM and require their students to do very little applied work, if any. Overall, and this is putting it mildly, Kenyan STEM departments aren’t famous for their research labs and outputs.
Given the problem of accurately classifying “STEM” degrees over time, I chose to look closely at engineering — a subject that crystallizes the stagnation and decline of STEM education in Kenya’s universities. I also chose to focus on public universities, since there are virtually no engineering offerings in private universities. As shown below, as of 2023 the share of university students enrolled in engineering stood at 2.9%, way down from the peak in the mid 1960s.
How did we get here? During its early days (both as a constituent college of University of London and the University of East Africa), between 20-34% of students enrolled at the University of Nairobi were pursuing a degree in engineering. Makerere and the University of Dar es Salaam absorbed other disciplines as part of the UEA system. Then beginning in the mid 1960s the share steadily declined as the UEA college and then the UoN (after 1970) expanded and other universities were created while at the same time maintaining the number of enrolled engineering students virtually constant. A short-lived reversal of this trend happened in the early 1990s with the creation of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT). At its founding about a third of JKUAT students were in the engineering department. However, the slight uptick in the engineering share of students was soon swamped by the massification movement after 2000.
The increasing engineering enrollment observed after the mid 1980s was mainly due to the creation of new universities. Meanwhile, the spikes after 2010 were caused by the government reclassification of tertiary institutions like the Kenya Polytechnic as universities. This caused a year-on-year instability in classification of students in the official statistics. The trends suggest that the numbers will likely stabilize soon — most likely at a lower level that what is currently shown in the data. In any case, it is telling (and objectively unfortunate) that the engineering share of students declined despite the spike caused by the purely administrative transformation of technical colleges into universities.
II: Higher education and development in Kenya
The decline of engineering (STEM) education described above mirrors the abandonment of higher education as a growth multiplier by the Kenyan state. This abandonment coincided with the acceptance of informalization in large chunks of the economy and public life.
The dominant narrative about the decline of Kenyan higher education emphasizes the twin challenges of autocratization (muzzling of free speech and thought in the universities) and the crushing budget cuts that came with structural adjustment programs. This narrative is largely true. Political upheavals in the late 1970s/early 1980s (including the 1982 coup attempt and purges that followed) as well as the budget constraints (that led to student protests and a dip in staff morale, not to mention access to educational materials) severely hampered university operations.
However, the abandonment of policy support for higher education as a vehicle for national development also deserves our attention. There are lots of examples of autocracies that maintained extremely high standards for research and teaching in their universities. The same states also ensured that islands of excellence were maintained even in the face of budget cuts. This means that autocracy and/or budgets, while important, aren’t sufficient explanations for the systemic decline of Kenyan universities.
We must also ask why the government appears to have simply given up on trying to maintain standards in the implementation of its own skills-based development strategy.
Bethwell Ogot and Madara Ogot provide some clues in their book on the history of the University of Nairobi. For example, they find that between 1981 through 1985 no new books were purchased for the University of Nairobi library. Over the same period, the student population increased by over 35%. In addition, the freezing of new hires and promotion in 1981 demoralized the academic staff, who ended up with ever growing class sizes. This was compounded by massive delays in graduation of PhD students that further aggravated the problem of undersupply of qualified teaching faculty.
It’s easy to chalk this up to tight budgets. However, it’s worth remembering that 1981 was also the year in which the Collins B. Mackay commission recommended the establishment of a second university with a focus on technology. In late 1985 Moi University came into being (although the technology focus was promptly abandoned). The government certainly had the resources to ensure standards didn’t collapse at UoN; or at the very least in specific islands of excellence — like in the engineering and economic departments, for example. After all, this was a time when the government ought to have been interested in boosting technological training and research (to serve its import substitution dreams), as well as its social scientific capacity for rigorous policy research and design.
Beyond politics and structural adjustment, there’s a related but separate story tying the decline of universities to trends in the economy and policymaking. For about 15 years after independence Kenya’s revealed development strategy was predicated on the gradual expansion of the relatively more productive “formal” sector. For all intents and purposes, the state simply ignored the “informal” sector beyond doing the bare minimum to ensure social order. In the education sector, this strategy of development through expansion of productive sectors was expressed in the rapid spread of basic education, as well as the establishment of sector-specific vocational tertiary institutions. This approach was a classic case of the state doing what it had always done:
The Kenya Government as long ago as 1903, established centres for applied research outside the University system. These included the Scott Agricultural Research Laboratories (1903), the Coffee Research Services (1908), and the Veterinary Research Laboratories (1910). Much later there followed the regional research centres under the East African Community, the medical Research Laboratory (1958) and the new Research Institutes under the National Council for Science and Technology Act (1977). These include the Medical Research Institute, Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute.
By the early 1980s there were polytechnics to train mechanics, electricians, plumbers, and workers in other trades; several colleges and institutes focused on training agricultural and livestock development personnel (e.g. JKUAT, Egerton, Embu, Bukura, AHITI in Kabete); Utalii College was for workers in the tourism sector; as well as schools to train middle management in both government administration and the private sector. In addition, several government agencies had their own training schools — e.g. Bandari College (ports), Railways Training School, Post and Telecommunications School at Mbagathi, Cooperative Development Training College, Forestry Training School, Water Development Training School, and the Medical Training Centre.
It’s actually quite impressive how you could begin to understand the Kenyan government’s development strategy simply by looking at its (aspirational) investments in manpower development. Agricultural development was the cornerstone of the rural strategy. Manufacturing targeted major urban areas as well as rural towns. Unfortunately, import substitution, as opposed to an aggressive export-oriented strategy, was the guiding star. Regarding manpower development in the technology sector, tertiary institutions were largely supposed to provide the skills needed to suppress Kenya’s manufactures import bill while boosting agricultural output. Interestingly, the policy documents also reveal a growing exasperation with the government’s inability to follow through on its stated policy objectives. Consider this bit of the Mackay (1981) report:
The development of rural areas will, however, need the creation of necessary infrastructure. The working Party therefore recommends that the disciplines in the second University should be oriented in developing the infrastructure that is necessary for rural development.
…The Government has invested heavily in the establishment and development of the University and other institutions of higher learning. In these institutions there now exists a significant concentration of highly trained manpower and specialized scientific and technological resources. However, these institutions have hitherto not been fully utilized in the process of nation building. Therefore, the working Party recommends that the nation should make greater use of the Universities and other institutions of higher learning for national planning and implementation of Government programmes.
Sadly, the major policy documents — from the Phelp-Stokes Commission (1924), Ominde Commission (1964), Gachathi Report (1976), Mackay Report (1981), Kamunge Report (1988), Sessional Paper No. 6 (1988), Koech Report (1999), as well as the post MDGs/SDGs reformitis-inspired policy actions (2005, 2013, 2019, 2020, 2023) — also document a clear deterioration of policymaking in the higher education sector (which certainly mirrored declines throughout the government). The Ominde, Gachathi, and Mackay policy documents were especially clear regarding the role of tertiary education in the national development strategy (critiques of their inattention to higher education’s role in socialization and formation would be justified). The same cannot be said of the policy documents that followed.
The disjuncture between higher education policy and development strategy persisted, and was highlighted in the Koech report (1999) almost 20 years after Mackay:
The Mackay Report (1981) recommended substantial expansion of middle level institutions. This recommendation was not implemented. Regrettably, a number of middle level colleges were, instead, converted to universities thus creating shortages of trained manpower at this level.
As indicated elsewhere in this Report, middle level institutions play an important role in most sectors of the economy. In particular, trained manpower is essential for agricultural and agro-industry sectors, where Kenya has a competitive edge. The Commission noted that Kenya’s rich agricultural base could be a spring-board to rapid industrialization.
As indicated elsewhere in this Report, middle level colleges play an important role in every sector of the economy. In particular, these institutions are the hope and the fulcrum of the industrial take-off which the nation plans to achieve by the year 2020 and where trained manpower is essential for the ensuing economic development.
Keen readers will notice that the most recent conversations of technical institutes and colleges into universities happened after 2010, a full decade after the Koech report reiterated the Mackay report’s warning against such moves.
Which brings us back to STEM. The abandonment of higher education as a development force multiplier wasn’t just because of politics and budgets. It was also ideational. Unable to expand the “formal” sector fast enough, the state simply capitulated to informality. Then came the erosion of the state’s commitment to a skills-based economy — best reflected in the neglect of STEM education (and higher education more broadly). The enabling political economy environment was that the strategies of accumulation among the ruling elites at the time (commodity exports and services) did not require investing in an oversupply of skilled manpower. Plus there was a growing sense that foreign advise and expertise could easily substitute for domestic expertise (and was the only ticket out of the dreadful long decade of stagnation, roughly 1980-1995).
If you talk to older Kenyans, most recall the time when the proverbial trains stopped running on time — it began after 1976 but became a lot more apparent a decade later. The strong commitment to high standards across multiple domains — personified in men like Mboya, Kibaki, and Murumbi — simply disappeared.
Thus the policy culture of being comfortable with a high variance between stated strategic direction (industrialization) and reality (declining share of manufacturing employment) became entrenched in Kenya.
I picked the industrial sector because it’s intimately tied to engineering/STEM. The statistics on manufacturing share of wage employment speak for themselves — from 9.33% in 1955 to 12.3% 1975 to 13.5% in 1985 to 13.52% in 1995 (virtually unchanged from 1985). As of 2023 the share of employment in manufacturing had shrunk to its lowest level since the 1950s at 11.5%. Yet despite this trend as late as 1999 the government was still publishing claims that the manufacturing share of employment would be 30% by 2020. In 2022 the claim was that “millions of jobs” would be created in the manufacturing sector by 2030 (against the 362,321 reported in 2023). On what basis? Where are the highly-trained workers and their supervisors going to come from? And how about energy and other infrastructure?
The legacy of the official abandonment of a high-skill labor economy endures — in STEM education and beyond. There are lots of smart and committed faculty and students at Kenya’s universities. However, the data paint a picture of serious structural problems. Research and quality control have been neglected. According to the Commission for University Education (CUE), in 2023 the entire university system in Kenya produced 2 patents and 6991 publications. To serve the whole system of almost 560,000 students, there were only 6318 faculty with PhDs. Among these, only 475 were full professors. In both private and public universities, the fully stretched and terribly under-resourced faculty have little time for research.
For example, in 2022/23 one private university reported a total of 141 teaching staff — two full professors, 8 associates, 117 lecturers but had 2090 graduate students. The same university also registered a total 52 outputs (publications and innovations) in 2022/23. Looking at the rest of the data from the CUE, it is clear that there is no correlation between the total number of PhD students and output (publications, patents, or innovations). The incentives are such that some departments have started handing out PhDs to individuals who haven’t done the work (including to politicians), thereby eroding trust in the process. This is the higher education system that Kenya’s political elites have chosen to impose on their society — and they continue to dig while in a deep hole with farcical alacrity.
It’s fair to say that higher education today is a far cry from the independence generation’s dream of the role of the university. Sierra Leonean Professor Arthur Porter, who was principal of the University College, Nairobi between 1964-1970 summed that role best:
We must complete that process [of entrenching sovereignty after independence] through our teaching and research by achieving our cultural independence… We must first know ourselves. History can only reveal answers to the questions put to her. So far, European scholars with their training in their own cultural experience, have put forward questions that have occurred to them about Africa and have answered them in their own way. We cannot continue to depend on these answers. The African interests, the African assumptions, the African questions, have now to be put and answered. This to me should be the responsibility of our university, and its attainment a sign that we have come of age as a truly African university.
III: Forever dreaming of the “Silicon Savannah”
It’s hard to write about STEM education without discussing the tech sector in Kenya. To cut to the chase, the historical lack of commitment to continuous accumulation of technical knowledge in service to specific developmental ends is abundantly reflected in Kenya’s posture in relation to the 3rd and 4th industrial revolutions.
The Kenyan government talks a big game about digital jobs, Kenya’s famed tech ecosystem (“Silicon Savannah”), Kenyans’ openness to new tech applications, and projects like Konza City (a “technopolis” designed by the government to serve as the main hub of everything digital in the country and wider region). However, talk is cheap. Beyond the elite-level hype around digital technology jobs there has been very little progress on the ground. Very few Kenyans work in the technology sector. In 2023 the government reported a mere 9,345 jobs in the “data processing, hosting, and related activities” category. The sector’s low wages present an additional problem. Everyone knows about the “digital sweatshops” phenomenon. These aren’t the tech jobs that policymakers should aspire to.
To understand why Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah” dream at times rings hollow you have to turn your attention to the universities. Every country that has made strides in tech has done so on the back of research, innovation, and a steady *over* supply of highly-trained individuals as well as firms that squeeze every ounce of productivity from highly-skilled employees.
That isn’t the case in Kenya. The ICT ministry’s latest strategic plan (2023-2027) mentions universities twice — in reference to localization of device assembly and with reference to the establishment of the Kenya Advance Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The word research is mentioned 18 times, but always in passing and never as a core part of the overall strategy. It’s hard to overstate the extent to which research and training of high-end engineering talent seldom features in the government’s thinking. For example, high profile engineers are sparse among senior policymakers in the ICT ministry and agencies. Respect for technical knowledge and capacity to executive highly complex initiatives simply doesn’t exist. It’s telling that when the government and its development partners talk about training they only ever mention “capacity building” geared towards promoting digital literacy. In other words, tech in the minds of policymakers starts and stops at end-user applications — with Kenyans mostly being users.
To be blunt, and with reference to the current technological moment, it would be ideal if Kenya and other African countries aspired to more than just providing Global South perspectives on AI regulation at conferences while hawking imaginary potential applications in the African context (with donor-funded pie-in-the-sky national AI strategies in hand, of course). At a minimum, there should be a focused race towards adapting open source AI to the Kenyan context. Right now a lot of the focus ought to be in building that technical capacity to the highest levels. And policymakers should do that while also investing in the oversupply of a technically trained labor force beyond ICT. The STS and economic history literatures convincingly demonstrate the vital importance of deliberately cultivating the diffusion of tacit knowledge about new technologies beyond their immediate applications. You cannot have (localized variations of) Schumpeterian growth or accelerate the production of useful technological knowledge without a critical mass of technically literate people *and* supporting institutions. That’s not a good model for nurturing a culture of progress to fuel structural economic change.
IV: Conclusion
Can the historical policy damage described above be reversed? Absolutely! As I noted above, the kernels of renewal still exist throughout the university system. They can be the foundation for a catalytic revolution towards higher standards in Kenya’s tertiary institutions — both in terms of the important work of education and formation of students as well as the production of “useful knowledge” for industry. If I had to do only four things to this end, here are the areas I would focus on.
1) Even while juggling the politics of massification, there should be a deliberate cultivation of protected and celebrated centers of excellence in specific schools or departments that are supported at all costs (policymakers should ignore all the chatter about “upward redistribution” through higher education): The idea here is that you want to learn and retain the knowledge of how to run an excellent university or vocation institute in the Kenyan context. And the only way to do that is by running excellent universities and vocational institutes. Here policymakers should be clear-eyed about the fact they won’t always get support from donors or the experts. Success will therefore hinge on an ideational commitment to making such investments work. For example, despite the fact that lack of access to pipe-borne water is a structural problem, the idea of a Water Development Training School will always lose to distributed WASH projects. The impacts of the former aren’t easily measurable over short time frames, it’s not readily scalable throughout the world, and it doesn’t give donors the warm glow of helping vulnerable people.
2) Get the financing right: Getting financing right does not mean mindless bean counting. Universities and tertiary institutions are as important as basic infrastructure. So they cannot always be the first to get cut in times of crises. That said, there is a need to ensure that Kenyan university are fiscally sustainable. A national public universities endowment fund would not be a bad idea (here’s an idea for Bill Gates as he plans to close shop). Budget allocations should be guaranteed and predictable. Departments should have access to seed funding for research, while also being encouraged to seek funds from the private sector and abroad. Collaborations with the private sector in the production of useful knowledge (and patents) can also help raise resources.
3) Collaborate with foreign universities: There should be a deliberate effort to establish a local presence of leading global universities, preferably within public universities that have been identified as centers of excellence. Demand that Beijing swaps out the Confucius Institutes with labs. Collaborate with America’s land grant universities, many of which have excellent STEM departments.
4) Empower and expect universities (and other tertiary institutions) to be bastions of knowledge production and repositories of high standards: This isn’t a case for elitism. Rather, it is a call for a return to the idea that having a trained workforce is desirable — regardless of the specific professions involved. As a low-income country, it is very easy to succumb to claims that policy must only focus on the bare minimum — vaccinating kids, providing access to essential services, etc — while leaving the more complicated endeavors like research and innovation to high-income countries. That would be a mistake. Successful catch-up economic development requires a lot more than just mindless copying of others. In order to achieve sustained productivity improvements developing countries must also invest in research and continuous upgrades of their stock of human capital.
STEM lost its value in Kenyan universities with exorbitant fees structure and unavailability of job placements. I agree about the Confucius institutes.They are of little benefit to the economy. Beijing has world class laboratories and equipment if they partnered with local universities to enroll qualifying students, it would enhance information exchange and development. The challenge is applicability, take for instance, with my highly advanced knowledge from a well recognized institution in China I cannot serve my country as the Kenyan universities and research institutes lack the resources to access the state of the art equipments, machines and maintenance . A dilemma for an upcoming individual.
In my opinion, the actual problem with university degrees in engineering is that they are designed to create employees, but in most countries there are already far more candidates than employers. I increasingly believe that the primary purpose of undergraduate tech programs is to provide access to internships at startups, to provide an example of what is possible and inculcate the startup mentality. Insofar as they don’t or can’t, they are useless: graduates don’t get jobs; neither do they create any. The degree is only used as a pathway to immigration.