Pain and anger as University of Nairobi school fees increase by 100%

Students at the University of Nairobi (UoN) will have to dig deeper into their pockets to fund their learning at the institution.

According to the latest review, the institution has more than doubled the fees for postgraduate courses and parallel degrees.

The move has been informed by the reduced number of students enrolling to join the University.

Affected courses include Communications and MBA for which students will have to pay more than Ksh 600,000 for a two-year program. Initially, they used to pay Ksh 275,000, indicating an increase of 118 percent.

Other degree courses in the institution have not been spared. Students will have to pay 70 percent extra to facilitate their education.

The new fees will apply to new students enrolling to join the University starting from August 2021.

UoN administration is hoping to use the review to turn around their fortunes which have been dwindling for the past few years.

In June 2018, the institution suffered a huge setback after it hit a record Ksh 1.4 billion loss.

The move to increase fees for postgraduate and self-sponsored students comes just after a similar move was opposed by state-sponsored students.

The Vice-Chancellor had pitched the idea of tripling tuition fees of state-sponsored students to Ksh 48,000 annually.

Compared to other universities, the increase is nearly half what a top institution like Strathmore charges.

To pursue medicine at UoN, a student is now expected to have amassed Ksh 3.8 million for the five-year course.

For law students, they have now to pay Ksh 1,020,000 from Ksh 715,500. Engineering will charge an average of Ksh 2.1 million from about the initial figure of Ksh 1 million.

The move has majorly been informed by the drop in enrolment which has also affected the workforce in the institution.

The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) revealed in their report that enrolment at the institution dropped from 98,715 in 2016 to 62,963 in 2020. That is an accumulative drop of 36.2 percent.

This comes just days after the institution abolished some colleges and scrapped positions. The University Vice-Chancellor Kiama on Friday, July,10 stated that for those affected, their contracts will simply not be renewed.