Go ahead with university reforms but reasonably

University reforms are under way. Such had been a subject of deliberations within the institutions’ ranks, and only required bold movers.

However, it shouldn’t have taken the International Monetary Fund to jolt them to action; the latter’s recommendations have hurt us before.

Nonetheless, various aspects need to be seriously considered. The first is financial management. Universities used to rake in money by the truckload from privately sponsored students but it was not used prudently. They went into a construction frenzy, putting up all sorts of magnificent structures and ceremonial offices and engaging in unsustainable expansion. With the prevailing strain on resources, prudent management isn’t optional.

The second is faculty. Instructively, our university education suffers from issues of quality, partly due to inadequate teaching staff. Part-time lecturers are the norm in most universities with some departments having a ratio of 1:20 against full-time faculty. To make a bad situation worse, most of the part-time lot often go without pay.

Quality service

It is not, therefore, difficult to see why such staff, who scurry from one institution to another, under deplorable conditions, cannot be relied on for quality service.

Unless the ratio of faculty is improved, lamentations about half-baked graduates shall never cease.

The third is congestion in lecture halls, specifically in the big universities. Whereas part of the problem can be solved through virtual learning, the requisite infrastructure is lacking.

It is foolhardy to keep on comparing ourselves to the established institutions across the border when we know all too well the outlook of our economy and its priorities.

We can depopulate the lecture rooms by moving some of the students to lowly populated universities, followed by adequate staffing. After all, university admission is no longer pegged on bed capacity.

Sounds cumbersome

The fourth issue is the extent to which local universities should specialise. World over, universities house differentiated programmes. Whereas duplication sounds cumbersome, if not irrational, there is a need to establish the extent to which we should specialise. I don’t, for instance, find harm in universities duplicating courses that are on high demand.

Further, there is no guarantee that specialist universities will yield better outcomes unless all other bottlenecks are addressed. If anything, specialisation might create monopolies. We know very well what monopolies have done to this country.

The fifth is tuition fees. Whether they adopt differentiated cost or not, the fee charged in public universities, having been set three decades ago, is unrealistic. A little increment will do. But that has to be agreed upon by all universities and crucial stakeholders for uniformity and fairness. Acting in isolation could be counterproductive, owing to the resistance that has always greeted the suggestion.

Mr Osabwa is a lecturer at Alupe University College, Busia. [email protected].