Kenyans obsessed with universities to a high degree

Kenyans, just like Singaporeans, love universities degrees to death. Today, as part of the country's new constituition implementation, Kenya's parliament found itselt debating whether it should be a requirement for Kenyans vying to be Members of Parliament have a university degree.

Meanwhile, across the oceans, AllthingsD reports that Christopher Stone is returning back to university, precisely to the "University of California's Berkeley's Haas School of Business to advise Master in Business Administration students on matters such as entrepreneurship and innovation". As I mentioned, Stone has been to university before,as a student, to Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts, Boston. On both ocassions, Stone was kind enough to drop out of university without ever completing his studies.

Stone happens to also be the co-founder of Twitter.

Seat back as the irony hits you. While we are keen and insistent on higher education, to others it's a distraction off the founding of multimillion dollar business.

Someone has successfully misled us that university degrees translate to good leaders of a high degree.

Facebook, another multimillion dollar business is known for hiring key staff in total disregard of whether they possess university degrees or not. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder is another famous university drop out. Google, on the other hand has been quite keen on possession of a university degree as a pre-requisite for employment. However, Google is known to overlook the requirement when it acquires staff through acquisition of a smaller firm.

Back to Kenya, the scramble for degrees brought about by the scramble for better positions in employment has left universities with an insatible demand. This has resulted in 'degree factories' where the end result is graduates who have no idea why they graduated in the first place.

My experience in university, while teaching me a few great skills, has failed for the major part to meet it's intended purpose.

By the way, you need a University degree to read this post.

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