An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. Benjamin Franklin
University education is slated for major reforms under the auspices of the Commission for University Education (CUE).
Media reports indicated that the Commission has prepared a draft Competence Based Framework for University Education (CBFUE) which, if adopted, is expected to align universities with the Competence Based Education Framework (CBE), the blueprint of the education reforms whose implementation began in 2019.
According to the report, entitled CBE framework proposes major changes in University Education, Daily Nation August 22, 2026, the proposed changes will affect what students are taught, how lecturers teach, how students are assessed and the skills they are expected to demonstrate upon completing undergraduate education.
The changes will also reportedly ensure that appropriate links are established between the programmes universities offer and relevant industries.
It is heartening that CUE has risen to the occasion to spearhead reforms in higher education. There has been a crying need for far-reaching reforms in the university education sector. This need has been there with or without the seismic changes taking place at the basic education levels.
For a long time, this country has held higher education as a twilight zone in all education reports. Nearly all reports on education and training reforms in Kenya have excessively focused on basic education. The reports have never dealt with the nuts and bolts that undergird university education.
We have never had a Task Force or a Presidential Working Party on University Education to specifically address university education. The nearest the country came to facing university education in its eyes was during the Report of the Presidential Working Party on Education and Manpower Training for the Next Decade and Beyond, chaired by James Kamunge. But the focus was more on financing of education and not the substance of university education: teaching and research. It was Kamunge who gave us the idea of cost-sharing education.
University as a Transcendent Institution
The university system symbolises something transcendent. It exists to preserve, create, and share knowledge. Former President of Yale University, Robert Levin, argues that the universities provide the ideal context for educating graduates for careers in science, industry, government, and civil society who have the intellectual breadth and critical-thinking skills to solve problems, to innovate, and to lead.
It is needless to say that universities have a purpose which goes beyond the concerns and purposes of primary and secondary education.
In education systems such as the USA and UK, the governments and leaders of the university education system have preserved, maintained and improved the resilience of the university to optimally serve the needs of society. They have gone further, as in the USA. They have sought to provide supervision and control of some kind on the quality of secondary education the States are providing, particularly those destined for college and university education.
The first time the leaders of universities sought to somewhat regulate the kind of education secondary education across the states were giving was in the 1890s.
Concerned with the problem of inconsistent college entrance requirements, the National Education Association (NEA) authorised a Committee of Ten eminent educationists to recommend standards for the various core subjects in the secondary school curriculum. Chaired by Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot, the committee established rigour and coherence among the secondary school course offerings. It consequently impacted the high school curriculum.
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Lessons From the US and UK Systems
The USA has had an excellent university education system. It is vigilant about the quality of education experience elementary, middle and high schools give its children. It worries about whether the schools are discharging their duties properly, and whether Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results are anything to be bought,
PISA measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges.
You see this vigilance and this worry in a 1983 Report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education, entitled A Nation at Risk, chaired by then President of the University of Utah, David Pierpont Gardner.
The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur; others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments, the report says in its introduction.
If there is anything The Committee of Ten and A Nation at Risk reports demonstrate, it is that the purposes and duties of university are independent. A university charts its own vision, purposes and programmes. It ensures that the students who join colleges must be prepared for its rigours.
In a nutshell, the university system in the USA has grown in excellence independent of the troubled reforms schools in the country have experienced throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
The same applies to the UK; the UK has had Commissions on University Education independent of the reforms that have taken place in pre-university education institutions. The Robbins Committee on Higher Education remains a reference point on higher education in the UK. One of the most memorable principles it established was that _courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so._
Suffice it to say that reforms and policy actions about university education shouldn’t, in the best of circumstances, be ignited by reforms at basic education levels. That is not how things work in other national educational systems.
What CUE Should Demand of Basic Education
Methinks that the higher education system in this country should be doing two things: first, to teach students how to think sturdily and secondly, to use its rich fund of knowledge, skill and judgment to advise on the kind of curriculum at the basic education level that best prepares students in terms of reading, writing, and thinking.
The demands the CUE and the leadership of the University Education must make to the leadership of Basic Education are these: that the students it sends to universities here and abroad should be college-ready. The students should have the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviour to undertake university education with ease.
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The interaction between policymakers at basic education and those in higher education should focus on how well learners who eventually qualify for university education are prepared in terms of the requisite knowledge, reading, writing, thinking, listening, and attitude toward university.
What takes place in the university- policy, standards, curriculum, and assessment- should be independent of this interaction.
The professors and university administrators are duty-bound to point out the critical expectations gaps between the knowledge and skills students ordinarily enter the university with and what college professors think students should be bringing with them to college.
This is a duty which universities haven’t satisfactorily discharged. My little thinking tells me that CUE should have been coordinating the collection and collation of whatever gaps in knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviour students have on an annual basis. The reports could, in the event the expectations gap is statistically significant, inform policy intervention by the Ministry of Education at basic education levels.
By Kennedy Buhere
Communication Specialist
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