KENYAN EDUCATION

GENERAL BACKGROUND

Kenya is a country of 53 million with a literacy rate of 82%, among the highest in Africa. Education is nominally compulsory and free for primary school (eight years). Secondary school (four years) costs upwards of $400 a year (per capita GDP is $1,816), and slightly more than half the appropriate age cohort is enrolled. The best-established secondary schools are boarding schools, because at the time they were founded, high schools were few and far between and transportation was limited. Government-supported boarding schools now cost $600 or more per year, private schools roughly double that.

In spite of these costs, even the poorest families commonly struggle to educate their most promising children, often borrowing heavily and selling precious assets like land or cattle to pay the fees of the best schools for which their children qualify. Qualification is based on the national primary school final exam (KCPE). Top scorers nationwide are eligible for places in highly selective “national” government-supported secondary schools or in comparable private schools. The next highest scorers qualify for so-called “county” schools, and the rest—the vast majority—are consigned to lowly “district” schools, which may be all the students’ families can afford, no matter how well the students scored on the KCPE. A number of KenSAP students have wound up at district schools under just these circumstances.

Not surprisingly, in view of this hierarchical structure, most top scorers on the national secondary school exam (KCSE) come from national or county schools. The KCSE is administered each October to more than 600,000 Form Four students (high school seniors) throughout the country. Students take exams in eight subjects, most of which they have studied for four years. Their aggregate mark is based on seven subjects: English, Math, Kiswahili, two sciences and two additional subjects, each given a letter grade and a numerical equivalent from 1 to 12. The highest possible aggregate mark is thus 84, achieved in recent years by fewer than 100 students nationally. KenSAP sets its baseline KCSE qualifying mark each year so that about ½ of 1% of all test takers are eligible to apply.

KENYAN ANOMALIES

Several unusual features of the Kenyan system may affect the way Kenyan students compare with rival international candidates for admission to selective American colleges and universities. For one thing, the absence of British-style A-level university preparation, which was abolished in Kenya’s educational restructuring in 1989, means that Kenyans face American standardized tests such as the SAT with fewer years of secondary education than most Commonwealth students. This disadvantages Kenyans in the Reading/Writing section of the test, where additional years of secondary instruction in English might compensate for deficiencies in the current Kenyan curriculum, which neglects humanities in favor of math and science. (The medium of instruction in all subjects is English, but there are practically no first-language English teachers in the entire country.)

In addition, Kenyan candidates may be handicapped by the very straightforwardness of the exam-based system of admissions for local universities. The KCSE is all-important; nothing else counts. Thus, the resume building that is second nature to high school students in America and elsewhere is utterly unknown in Kenya. If a Kenyan student pursues an extra-curricular interest, it is a genuine interest, unalloyed by college admission considerations. But for that reason, the student’s list of activities may seem unusually short. Moreover, since recommendations are irrelevant for Kenyan university admission, teachers are accustomed to writing no more than a perfunctory sentence or two, along the lines of, “Good student, well behaved.” And teachers’ evaluations often seem oddly skewed by a misplaced concern about overpraising. A student who breaks the school record on the KCSE, for example, might be rated “Good” or “Very good.”

For all this, American college admissions officers have generally been able to see beyond the apparent shortcomings in KenSAP applicants’ files; in the past 14 years, every one of the program’s 196 candidates has been admitted with full aid to a highly selective college. And so far, notwithstanding a few missteps, the matriculated students have shown themselves well able to make the vast leap from rural Kenya to the most competitive American institutions.