Growing frustration is emerging among parents with children enrolled at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), particularly those in engineering courses , who say they are paying full tuition fees every semester only for their children to receive little to no academic instruction. Parents say JKUAT is offering poor academic value in engineering courses, with students missing most classes but still passing exams.
The complaints centre around repeated patterns where students, even in core technical programmes, allegedly attend less than a dozen lectures across an entire semester but still proceed with exams and progress normally through the system.
One parent, whose two children are pursuing Civil and Geomatics Engineering, has shared her experience — questioning whether this is now the norm in Kenya’s public universities and warning that such gaps could lead to a generation of underprepared graduates. "Hello Nyakundi. I need to expose JKUAT University. I’m a parent of 2 students one studying Civil Engineering and the other Geomatics Engineering both second years. I pay about 170k per semester for each student that’s around 350k per sem. My concern is, this semester no one has attended class for more than 10 times. Last semester it was the same. Of course they passed their exams but I feel like we are getting raw deal at these public universities. Should I be concerned or is it what happens in all public Universities? No wonder we end up with half baked professionals…"