- Sources close to KUCCPS put North Eastern ahead of the country on C+ attainment, yet at only 13 per cent of the national applicant pool.
- Nationally, 19.3 per cent of eligible candidates did not apply at all. The question is whether this region’s gap is worse, and why.
- No regional breakdown has been published. That silence is part of the problem.
Sources close to the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service put North Eastern ahead of the country on the minimum university entry grade. Wajir at 70 per cent C+ and above. Mandera and Garissa at 69 per cent each.
The same sources put the region’s share of the national KUCCPS applicant pool at 13 per cent. Neither figure has been published in disaggregated form. I come back to that.
Start with what the numbers are not. The two percentages measure different things. One is a within-county pass rate. The other is a share of a national pool. They were never built to be read side by side, and a region with a small candidature will always look thin in a national share.
Start also with what is not unique. Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba has said 51,835 candidates, 19.3 per cent of those eligible, did not apply for placement at all this cycle. Walking away from a university place is a national habit, not a North Eastern one.
But that is the point, not the answer. If one in five qualified Kenyans is declining a place, the country needs to know why. And if the rate is worse in Wajir than in Nyeri, it needs to know that too, in figures rather than rumour.
Many explanations are possible. I take two, because they are the most testable and the most fixable. The first concerns the grade. The second concerns the cost of using it.
The grade question
The first question is whether a C+ reliably reflects the capacity it certifies.
Two concerns sit inside it. Grade ownership: is the grade fully the candidate’s own? Grade quality: will it hold up under coursework, funding assessment and, eventually, the labour market?
Where confidence is intact, a qualifying grade works as intended. It opens a door, and the holder trusts it enough to walk through.
Where it is uncertain, for reasons I will not assume here, the grade loses some of its power to move anyone. A student unsure whether the grade reflects their readiness has a rational, if quiet, reason to avoid a process that will test that readiness directly.
This is not an accusation against any candidate, school or county. It is a claim about how people behave under uncertainty, and it should be tested, not assumed.
The stakes cut both ways. If grade confidence is suppressing applications, no amount of outreach or subsidy will close the gap, because the barrier sits upstream of both. If it is not a factor, the finding lifts an unearned cloud from the region’s honest high performers. Either way, evidence beats inference.
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The fee question
The second question is whether cost alone suppresses applications from qualified candidates.
Kenya’s Student-Centred Funding Model, delivered through HELB and the Universities Fund, distributes scholarships and loans by assessed need. Since 2023, the Fund has supported more than 400,000 students and disbursed over Sh37 billion.
Here is the trap. Placement is the gate to that money. Without a KUCCPS placement, a student cannot access a scholarship at all. So a family that declines to apply because it fears the cost has, by that very decision, forfeited the support designed to meet it.
And the costs are real. Fees not covered by scholarship. Transport across long distances. Upkeep away from home. The opportunity cost of a working-age child leaving a pastoralist household. Where disbursements run late, or the portal is hard to navigate, a family weighing a certain cost now against an uncertain benefit later may rationally stay out.
A third possibility deserves naming. Nationally, qualified students are increasingly choosing TVET and diploma courses over degrees, driven by graduate unemployment and the cost of a degree. If North Eastern’s candidates are making that choice deliberately, the gap is a preference and not a failure. If they are not applying anywhere at all, it is a failure. Nobody currently knows which.
The case for an enquiry
These questions share one feature. None is supported by rigorous, region-specific evidence. They are plausible. They are widely discussed. But plausibility is not proof, and policy built on inference will either miss the barrier or stigmatise a region.
So: an independent enquiry, properly staffed, with a narrow mandate.
Establish the facts. Publish the disaggregated placement and application data, county by county, so the region’s position rests on record rather than report.
Separate the causes. Distinguish grade confidence from cost from deliberate TVET preference, and weigh each against the others.
Protect the innocent. Frame any finding on grade confidence so that it points at systems rather than at children, and shields the region’s legitimate performers from collective suspicion.
Fix it, and say who must. Turn findings into measures with names attached and placement cycles to monitor them over.
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There is a smaller problem sitting inside the larger one
Figures of this consequence should not reach the public through sources close to an agency. They should be published by it.
KUCCPS holds placement data for every county in Kenya. If the numbers now circulating are wrong, the remedy is simple: publish the right ones. If they are correct, the country has a question to answer.
An agency that releases only national aggregates leaves regional performance to be inferred, disputed and whispered about. That is exactly how an unearned cloud forms over a region which, on these figures, is leading the country.
From a base of deep historical marginalisation, North Eastern’s students appear to lead the nation in the very grade that qualifies them for university. That is remarkable.
It deserves a system that receives it fully, not one that lets qualified candidates fall away for reasons nobody has bothered to establish.
The 70 per cent have done their part. Establishing why so few of them reach a lecture hall is now a public responsibility. They earned their place. The 13 per cent is a question the country owes them an answer to.
By Ibrahim Adan
Education, policy and development expert
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