Nairobi — Two reports last week rekindled debate about the quality and relevance of university education.

One was about the Teachers Service Commission, an employer, expressing concern over the scarcity of humanities teachers.

Yet, the universities were training teachers in some disciplines like botany, zoology and economics, which were not offered in high schools.

The second was about academicians complaining at the scarcity of agriculture graduates, yet our economy is agri-based.

Worried that few students applied for agriculture courses, the academicians recommended that the subject be made compulsory in schools.

Isolated as they were, the common thread running through them was that there is a mismatch between education, training and employment.

This fact can clearly be attributed to the unplanned growth and development of education in the past two decades or so.

Take the public universities, for example.

Between 1985 and 2008, enrolments went up 10 times, and the number of universities grew from two to seven, plus a galaxy of campuses. Indeed, this is an impressive achievement.

Even so, as enrolment expanded, little attention was given to the type, quality and relevance of courses offered.

The expansion was supply, rather than demand driven. More students desired higher education and so opportunities had to be created irrespective of the marketability of the courses.

And even this had its contradictions. Sometimes in the 1990s, the Government stopped employing graduates in some areas like agriculture and humanities, sending strong signal that such courses were not marketable, hence students shunned them.

This supply-based model for university education is precarious and untenable. Education, and particularly at the university level, should essentially aim at serving the national socio-economic needs.

When economic planners craft their development plans, they should seriously think about the content and quality of education to implement the agenda.

Precisely, this is what South Korea has done since 1969 -- matching every development plan with education content. And the results are there for all to see. From a struggling economy, South Korea is one of the fancied economic tigers of South East Asia.

The challenge for Kenya, and particularly education managers and providers, is to change the model from supply to demand-base.

That is how we can eliminate the enormous waste we experience today, namely of thousands of unemployed graduates.