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For the full story, see Business Daily, Kenya, March 10, 2008 (www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6333&Itemid=5822)

 

PROPHE Observation (by Wycliffe Otieno):
The report makes reference mostly to private colleges that have proliferated since the era of liberalization of higher education in Kenya in the mid 1980s.  The large number of private institutions has upped the competition for students.  Players have therefore resorted to different marketing strategies to remain competitive.  The report is mostly descriptive, and missed the important analysis of the patterns of private onslaught on a market has hitherto been dominated by public providers, and specifically, the marketing strategies, orthodox or non-conventional, employed by the private players to cut a niche for themselves. The international reputation of an institution, judged by international partners, is one of the areas of competition among private institutions.  In many cases, all that institutions have to do is to advertise their international partners even when they cannot prove, or confirm the credibility of the partners.  Gullible prospective students do not bother to get deeper into the details of the partnership. Consumer ignorance is therefore something that institutions have thrived on.  How much this is a typical behavior of private for-profit institutions is a matter that has received modest attention in international literature. 

The emergence of unaccredited colleges is an outcome of a pervasive and unmet demand for higher education.  Coupled with the limited capacity of the regulating authority (CHE), it provides a fertile ground for the proliferation of low end, commercial and demand absorbing private institutions that care less about international standards of accreditation and certification. The description here largely fits PROPHE’s longstanding category of private “demand-absorbers.” The story cited in the BD is not the first one.  In 2003, CHE forced the Australian Universities Institute (AUSI) to drop the ‘university’ tag because it had not been registered as a university in Kenya. AUSI was accused of using the ‘university’ tag illegally to entice students.  In 2005, CHE stopped the graduation ceremony of a little known private institution in partnership with Newport International University, which is accredited neither in Kenya nor the United States.  The institution in question was neither registered with the CHE nor the Ministry of Education. Instead, it is registered under the Companies Act of the Laws of Kenya. These incidences reveal the pitfalls that the clearly (though not officially) for-profit institutions face in Kenya: difficulties with accreditation; operating outside the legal framework of higher education provision; and engaging in partnerships with largely unknown foreign institutions.

Yet, to assume that the problem unaccredited institutions in illegal operation is confined to Kenya would be as preposterous, as would be assumption that it is exclusively a third world or African problem.  Some of the international institutions that the unaccredited colleges partner with locally also have credibility problems back at home.  Still fresh in our minds is the saga that cost the outgoing Secretary General of the World Council of Churches (unfortunately a Kenyan!) to decline defending his seat after it was discovered that the US university that awarded him a PhD in theology had not been accredited and had been forced to close. In India, the regulating authority has been stern on private players for violating basic regulations. In April 2005, the regulating authority in Uganda revoked the license of a private university for ‘lacking the capacity to effectively deliver higher education’. Three others were given one year to upgrade to charter status while a fourth was given three months to demonstrate its ‘viability’ or close down.

The case of the Digital Advisory Learning Centre (DALC) demonstrates the scale of the problem – it extends from Africa to Europe to the Americas and Oceania. Which poses a further question: do we have international institutional fraudsters in higher education?  If so, are these fraudsters mainly private?  Public institutions are generally known to have less legitimacy problems than their private counterparts.  This is what the Kenyan story confirms.

 

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