Agnes Wahome, the CEO of the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service, explained on Tuesday why many students end up placed in courses they did not apply for, following initial concerns raised by affected students.
Wahome revealed that the students applying for the medical courses were the most affected by the wrong placement in other programmes they did not apply for.
The CEO explained that KUCCPS receives more than 10,000 applications for medical courses and ends up placing less than 1,000 students per university.
''We place less than 1,000 students across all the universities that offer medicine courses. However, the number of students who apply is more than 10,000," Wahome stated.
''We noticed that students select courses in a way that if you ask them the careers they want to take, they respond that they want to take medicine courses.''
The KUCCPS chief appealed to thousands of applicants seeking to gain spots in the more than 70 public and private universities across the nation to avoid overreliance on specific courses.
According to the CEO, the service has had a challenge with the majority of students applying for specific universities that they deem prestigious.
She added that according to their data, they observed that students prefer the older and established universities while ignoring the recently chartered ones.
She revealed that this often compelled the service to assign them to universities they had not applied to, to balance the number of students at each institution.
"I would like Kenyans to know that there are more programmes other than medicine. There is no bad program, and all of them are good and marketable, depending on what you do with the certificate after school," she explained
Additionally, Wahome urged Kenyans to take more time when selecting their programmes to avoid having difficulties in finishing the processing of the applications.
KUCCPS has different colour segments for both public and private universities to help applicants save time while on the portal.
