Casual degrees, casual minds: Kenya’s higher education as a precarious gig economy

By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo

In 2025, Kenya’s universities enrolled 707,150 students while academic staff grew only to 16,434. The student-to-staff ratio in public chartered universities climbed from 44 to 51 in a single year. Adjunct and part-time lecturers more than doubled, from roughly 758 to over 1,600. These are not abstract numbers. They are the measurable pulse of an institution that once produced Africa’s intellectual elite and now manufactures disposable knowledge workers.

This is the casualization of higher education in Kenya: the systematic conversion of teaching, research, and mentorship into temporary, underpaid, benefit-free labour. It is not an accident of austerity. It is the logical outcome of deliberate policy choices that treated universities as cost centres rather than engines of national capacity.

Once upon a time the story was different. In the 1980s Kenya’s public universities stood among Africa’s strongest. University of Nairobi, Kenyatta, and Moi produced scholars who shaped regional policy, science, and letters. The system was selective, publicly funded, and staffed largely by permanent academics who carried institutional memory. Then came the structural adjustment years, the liberalisation of the 1990s, and the invention of Module II the parallel, fee-paying track that allowed universities to admit students who had not met the competitive cut-off. Enrolment exploded. The number of universities ballooned from one at independence to more than eighty nine institutions today. Massification arrived without matching investment in permanent academic staff, laboratories, or libraries.

The result is a two-tier professoriate. A shrinking core of permanent lecturers carry impossible workloads sometimes five or more units a semester, classes of hundreds, endless marking, and the fiction of research. Around them swirls a growing periphery of part-timers and adjuncts paid by the hour or by the unit, often months in arrears, without medical cover, pension, or any realistic path to permanence. Some earn as little as one thousand shillings an hour. Others wait years for claims that mysteriously disappear in bureaucratic black holes. Universities advertise for “part-time lecturers” as if knowledge itself were a casual shift at a supermarket.

This is not merely labour market inefficiency. It is the slow poisoning of the academic vocation. A lecturer who must teach at three campuses to survive cannot supervise theses with care, cannot design coherent curricula, cannot mentor the next generation of thinkers. Research becomes an afterthought. Institutional memory evaporates when the same course is taught each year by a different temporary face. Students sense the transactional atmosphere. They arrive expecting transformation and encounter a conveyor belt of certificates.

The irony is cruel. Kenya lectures the continent about the knowledge economy while treating its knowledge workers as casual labour. We celebrate Silicon Savannah and Vision 2030 while the institutions meant to supply the human capital operate like gig platforms. The same government that speaks of industrialization tolerates student-staff ratios that would shame a secondary school, then expresses surprise when graduates lack the depth, creativity, and professional habits the labour market claims to need.

History supplies the warning. When societies cheapen the transmission of knowledge, they do not merely produce weaker graduates; they weaken the capacity for self-correction. Medieval universities survived because they protected a permanent scholarly class. The great American research universities of the twentieth century grew because they invested in tenured faculty who could take intellectual risks. Kenya has chosen the opposite path: expand access while starving the very people who make access meaningful. The parallel degree programmes of the 1990s solved a short-term funding crisis by creating a long-term quality crisis. Today’s reliance on adjuncts solves a short-term payroll crisis by mortgaging the future.

The human cost is visceral. Young PhD holders, products of the same system, circulate between institutions on short contracts, applying for permanent posts that never materialise because universities prefer cheaper temporary labour. Senior scholars retire or leave for better-resourced environments abroad. Departments hollow out. Ethnic politics and patronage appointments fill leadership positions while competence is treated as optional. Campuses close or shrink. Pending bills reach tens of billions of shillings. Strikes become routine because the underlying contract between the state and its knowledge institutions has been broken.

This is not sustainable. A nation that treats its universities as temporary shelters for students and temporary employment for lecturers will eventually discover that both groups have temporary loyalty to the national project. Quality will continue to erode. The best minds will continue to exit. Employers will continue to complain about “unemployable” graduates while refusing to confront the deliberate under-investment that produced them.

The actors who must act are clear.

The national government must stop treating higher education as a residual budget item. Capitation must be realistic, predictable, and tied to quality indicators rather than pure enrolment numbers. The accumulated arrears that strangle public universities must be settled. Collective bargaining agreements cannot be negotiated in good faith if universities are left to fund them from already inadequate fees. Permanent academic positions must be ring-fenced and expanded in line with student growth.

University councils and vice-chancellors must abandon the illusion that casualization is smart management. Every permanent post converted into three part-time contracts is an admission of strategic failure. Workload policies must be enforced. Payment of part-time claims must be prioritized rather than treated as discretionary. Succession planning cannot be an afterthought.

The Commission for University Education must move beyond counting institutions and begin enforcing staffing norms with consequences. Ratios that exceed reasonable limits should trigger restrictions on new admissions until capacity is restored. Quality audits that ignore the composition of the teaching workforce are theatre.

Academic staff unions must fight not only for better pay for the permanent core but for the dignity of the entire academic labour force. The normalization of exploitation of part-timers ultimately weakens everyone’s bargaining power.

Students and parents must demand more than certificates. They must ask whether the person standing in front of the class has the institutional support, time, and security to teach with depth. A degree obtained under conditions of academic precarity is a diminished degree, whatever the parchment says.

The deeper insight is this: casualization is not a technical adjustment. It is a philosophical surrender. It declares that knowledge is a commodity to be delivered at the lowest possible labour cost rather than a public good that requires protected custodians. Once that declaration is accepted, everything else follows the overcrowded lecture halls, the delayed salaries, the vanishing research, the hollowed institutions.

Kenya once understood that universities were the places where a young nation thought about itself. Today those places are being turned into temporary warehouses for ambition. The warehouses will eventually empty. What will remain is a generation that was taught by people who themselves were treated as temporary, and a society that wonders why its intellectual infrastructure feels so fragile.

The Choice is still available, but the window is narrowing. Restore permanence to the academic vocation, or continue manufacturing casual degrees for a casual future. History will not be kind to the latter path.

The writer is a social commentator

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