State of Financial Challenges among Public Universities Students in Kenya

Kenya has had phenomenal increased access to university education since 1998 when the parallel degree programmes were introduced. Currently Kenya has 22 public universities with two categories of students, the Module I and Module II. The former category of students would have their fee subsidized while the latter cater for their own tuition fee. The study sought to find out the financial challenges that university students in Kisii and Laikipia universities face. The study adopted a cross sectional survey design, involving 607 and 332 Module II and Module I students in Kisii University, 191 and 177 Module II and Module I students in Laikipia University respectively, as well as lecturers, Deans of students’ and Academic registrars in the two universities. Both purposive and snowballing sampling techniques were employed to obtain the sample of interest. Instrumentation was by use of semi-structured questionnaires, as both descriptive and inferential statistics data obtained analyzed using SPSS version 20. The study found that, majority90% in KSU and 84.7% in LU of Module I students received loans from the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) compared to the module II students. The module II students were further favored as the general public is more willing to fund for their education. TheModuleII programmes should be demystified so that the HELB and the general public should be willing to fund for the Module II education. Keywords: Loans, University Students, Public Universit