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Over half of varsity qualifiers yet to apply on Kuccps portal
The Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (Kuccps) Chief Executive Officer Agnes Mercy Wahome during the release of the placement report for the KCSE 2023 candidates in Nairobi on May 21, 2024.
More than half candidates who scored C+ and above in the 2024 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) have not applied for university placement with two weeks left to the deadline.
Data from the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (Kuccps) shows 104,514 of the 246,391 qualifiers have applied for degree programmes in the next academic year.
The Kuccps extended the application window to April 30 from April 21, to allow more candidates to apply.
“So far, we have received 104,514 degree applicants. We are encouraging students to take up agricultural courses at degree level,” Kuccps Chief Executive Agnes Mercy Wahome told the Business Daily.
“The response has been good so far. We’ve not had problems with the application system. The integration with eCitizen has been seamless since we enhanced the IT infrastructure.”
She said Kuccps staff are conducting sensitisation campaigns countrywide.
Dr Wahome said the deadline was pushed to the end of April because there are more applicants this year than in the past.
She said 8,130 students, who scored C+ and above making them eligible for university placement, had opted for diploma courses.
The diploma courses they opted for are in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions, the Kenya Medical Training College, Kenya School of Law and Morendat School of Oil and Gas.
The agency expects some of the candidates (about 15 percent), who attained university qualifications, to pursue studies abroad, at private universities and other institutions.
The Kuccps platform allows the selection of the students who sat the 2024 KCSE in universities and TVETs to commence their studies this year.
The academic calendar for most universities begins between August and September.
For TVETS, the platform targets 2024 and previous year’s KCSE candidates who never benefited from government-sponsorship for placement to Diploma, Craft Certificate and Artisan courses.
So far universities have declared capacities of about 300,000 which is enough to accommodate all the 2024 candidates that scored C+ and above.
The declared slots by the universities are controlled by the Commission for University Education (CUE) which considers the facilities available in the institutions to determine how many students can be accommodated.
A high court ruling in December quashed the funding model introduced by the government in May 2023, leaving it unclear how freshmen joining universities alongside those in their second and third year of study will be funded.
Kuccps appealed the ruling but its attempt to have it stayed to allow the placement of students into various programmes flopped.
Following the ruling, the Kuccps said it will not display the cost pegged on academic programmes on its portal as had been the norm over the past two years.
Prior to the High Court ruling, institutions of higher learning were required to publicisise the actual course cost in order to allow students and their guardians to make informed choices about the programmes on offer and plan accordingly.
Students that make it to the final placement list by Kuccps will be eligible for government support through scholarships, loans and bursaries.
Centre applications, otherwise known as school applications for placement of government sponsored students to universities and colleges that were normally done ahead of candidates sitting their KCSE have since been scrapped.
