President William Ruto has confirmed that his administration will do away with the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) and instead come up with a different formula to finance institutions.

In a joint media interview at State House Nairobi on Wednesday evening, President Ruto said many universities in the country are experiencing financial woes as a result of poor funding, even as students continue to throng higher education institutions.

In the new formula to salvage the current financial crisis in the institutions, the Head of State discloses that HELB, the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) and the University Funding Board (UFB) will be merged to achieve effectiveness and efficiency.

“We have a huge problem with higher education. Auditor General already has said almost all universities are bankrupt because they have many problems,” President Ruto said.

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“Recently, some university managements were taken to court because they have not paid salaries for lecturers and other staff. The case is just chaotic because the government capitation is just only 52 percent of the funds they need.”

He further added, “As a government, even if we look at Kenya Kwanza manifesto, we will put together HELB, KUCCPS and University Funding Board so that we will not have one institution doing funding, another places students in universities and colleges and they do not share notes. This is what leads to confusion because students continue to join universities with no enough funding and [we] find ourselves here.”

“We will ensure that there is harmony and we will harmonise all these institutions so that when a student joins a particular university or college, the government knows what amount the institution should be given.”

The President says that unless the current crisis in the institutions are dealt with, the quality of education in universities and colleges is likely to decline.

“This is the only way we will bring order in our universities so that we don’t have institutions which are cash-strapped. If this issue is not addressed now, we’re going to interfere with quality of education in our universities,” he said.

The Kenya Kwanza administration will establish a national skills and funding council to connect the two levels in order to provide a credit transfer framework and to support academic progression.

The National Education Fund will mobilise grants, bursaries, and scholarships from private and public sponsors to cover non-tuition costs.

President Ruto also underscored that his administration will focus on Technical Training and Vocational Educational Training Institution (TVET).

“The issue of TVET had stopped some time back because there were people who were not understanding this sector. We are employing around 2,000 TVET tutors. We have 50 TVETs which are not equipped and we’re in talks with China and Germany to equip these institutions so that our youth will acquire skills and competence in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem),” said Dr Ruto.

Abolishing HELB has sparked harsh criticism from leaders who have asked President Ruto to reconsider the matter.

The universities funding board, UFB, has proposed a new funding formula, which would streamline university education. The new proposals will favour post graduate students, students with special needs, universities that are efficient in student graduation and universities whose graduates do not tarmac.

In the proposed plan, universities that are efficient in graduating their students upon completion of their courses and those whose students get jobs within one year of graduation would get higher funding.

Also to benefit from higher funding are universities which offer courses that fall within the key government priority areas since the new funding regime seeks to strengthen the national development agenda.

The new proposal will subject the government to exercising selective funding, projected to benefit students who enroll in the targeted core courses.

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Universities that have focused in special areas such as agriculture, engineering or science would also get higher allocations as the government encourages specialization in institutions of higher learning.

students with special needs enrolled in universities will be fully funded by the government and their expenses taken care of. All they need to get this funding is to be registered as persons living with disabilities and to acquire a registration number.

According to the proposal, post-graduate students, who have always been ignored under the present funding regime, will also get up to 80 per cent financing from the State.

This means that universities will get more money depending on the number of government Masters and Doctorate scholarships declared in a particular year to develop teaching and research capacity in universities.

However, students who benefit from government postgraduate scholarships, will be bonded to a university for a period of time prescribed by the Fund.

Also to attract more funding will be the number of female students enrolled in STEM, persons with disability and students admitted from disadvantaged socio-economic background.

UFB CEO, Geofrey Monari has praised the proposed formula stressing that it has been developed to guide apportionment of infrastructure grants, which have not been consistent in the past.

“And this can be observed through the various stalled projects in most of the universities. We shall now have funding criteria for issuance of capital development grants. This will encourage public private partnerships with universities to ease pressure on the Government infrastructure support,” said Monari.

He said the revision of the model will provide a more transparent accountable funding framework for universities in apportioning funds for teaching and learning, infrastructure and introduction of performance based funding.

Broadly, the framework makes far reaching proposals on how universities money shall be shared based on four key parameters–post graduate research, national priority areas, institutional factors (age of university) and special needs education.