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Kenya: Western Varsities Rank Highly As Third World Counterparts Take Back Seat
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The Nation (Nairobi)
10 March 2008
Posted to the web 10 March 2008
Julius Bosire And Sam Kiplagat
Nairobi
This year's world university ranking indicates that the top centres of higher learning are found in the developed world, a trend attributed to heavy state funding and web connectivity.
Although heavily dependent on state funding, the universities in the developed world are said to be independent in the sense that governments don't poke their noses into their running.
The universities had common factors like generating new technology and ideas that closely integrated into the economies and societies they operate in. Their highly employable graduates also ploughed back donations in the form of alumni contributions, research grants and spin-off companies.
The ranking by Times Higher-QS World University Rankings placed Harvard University at the top this year for the fourth time in a row. The university is considered the world's richest.
Web connectivity
But the major question is whether it is fair to rank Third World universities with those in developed nations.
Education Permanent Secretary Karega Mutahi points out that the ranking was mainly based on a university's connectivity to the web.
It is a fact that most universities in the developed world are electronically enabled so that one does not need to sit in a library to read. He or she can pick up a laptop, hook it to the net and access the material of choice.
Another emerging issue in the rankings was that the 200 top universities came from only 28 nations. Only four of them came from the developing world.
The factors considered in the ranking include the universities' success in generating new knowledge, teaching quality, their attractiveness to students, how they spend their alumni donations and research grants. Others include the relevance of courses offered to the demands of the job market, the amount of funding by governments and how they utilise them and how much they have embraced modern technology.
Also considered in such ranking are academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning of Nobel Prizes and field medals, highly cited researchers, articles published in Nature and Science, articles indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution.
Information obtained from the Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says for each indicator, the leading institution is assigned a score of 100. Other institutions' marks are calculated as a percentage of the top score.
The distribution of data for each indicator is examined for any significant distorting effect - standard statistical techniques are used to adjust the indicator if necessary.
Scores for each indicator are weighted to arrive at a final overall score for an institution. An institution's rank reflects the number of institutions that sit above it.
Although public universities in the country have been striving to cope with many challenges, much blame would go to the Government, which has not accorded higher education the attention it deserves.
But many local scholars argue that, to a greater extent, higher education operates on its own with very little direction and support from the Government.
Most public universities have been forced to diversify their programmes, introduce new courses and start flexible modes of teaching to attract many students. These additional students pay full fees without Government support, enabling the institutions to sustain themselves.
It has also been noted that poor links between universities and the Government hamper research initiatives. When contacted, many Kenyan scholars admitted that they remain largely unrecognised globally because their research work is not published widely.
Poor pay and working conditions add to the problem, pushing many lecturers to various money-making ventures.
Most of them run from university to another and to middle-level colleges to boost their income. In doing so, there is little room for research. To cope with the teaching challenge, these lecturers are also forced to recycle notes, many of which are borrowed from overseas.
Intellectual mitumbaism
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Prof Bethuel Ogot, Moi University's Chancellor, terms this "Intellectual mitumbaism" (mitumba refers to second-hand clothes).
At Kenyatta University, the authorities admit that there are numerous challenges hampering its research activities. These challenges include insufficient funding, inadequate infrastructure for research and dissemination of research findings. An Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policy at the university level is also absent in addition to the lack of a comprehensive database on past research and the dynamism in knowledge and skills in research methodologies.
A lecturer at the University, Dr Jackton Ogeno, says a number of scholars have not been posting their research findings on the Internet.
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