Concern as students miss out on university courses of choice

Some professional courses in public universities failed to attract more than two students in the just concluded second and final revision of course choices ahead of the September admission date.

This forced the Kenya Universities and Colleges central Placement Service (KUCCPS) — the body charged with admitting students to public universities — to place some students in programmes that they had not selected or applied for.

KUCCPS Chief executive officer John Muraguri on Wednesday raised concern over poor career guidance noting that most of the candidates were only focusing on few careers.

During the second and final revision, about 20,000 candidates who sat for the 2014 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination had failed to get their first course choices.

Liberal Arts and Environmental courses were least preferred because candidates felt they offered fewer openings in the job market.

About 67,790 candidates have been selected to join the 31 public universities and another 12,000 will join colleges across the country starting September.

On Wednesday, just a day after getting an alert on which programme and university the students will be joining, a number of them accompanied by parents were at KUCCPS headquarters in Nairobi seeking guidance on how to change to their courses of choice and university.

Several of them complained that they had been selected to undertake degree programmes that they do not like.

However, Mr Muraguri said the inter-university transfer is set to start on August 1, and will close on September 30.

However, those seeking transfer must get assured that where they want to go has space and they meet the requirements.

Mr Muraguri disclosed that KUCCPS was developing an online system to cater for the inter-universities transfers in the coming two months.

“Students can download the form for transfers from the transfer portal from our website starting August 1,” he said.

Several candidates missed on their courses of choice due to increase in cluster points after more students performed well in the national examination.

Education stakeholders have now proposed that the KUCCPS should do away with cluster system and instead embrace individual subjects.

The Technical University of Kenya Vice-Chancellor Prof Francis Aduol said many students were being locked out of Universities degree programmes that they wish to pursue and qualify due to the cluster system.

“We are not paying interest to individual subjects in degree programme as compared to in the diploma courses. It is high time we give individual subject the necessary attention,” said Prof Aduol.

He observed that courses such as Law were insisting of a B+ in English while Engineering courses were now demanding that the candidate must have a C+ in English.

Reference : www.nation.co.ke