It’s still a messy manual intake in some varsities

Each semester, tents and backside office windows in many universities serve as registration points for thousands of students seeking registration for courses and to be allocated rooms.

Long winding queues of jostling young men and women struggling to obtain service from a visibly overwhelmed administrator becomes a familiar scene.

Yet it should be possible to be enrolled from the comfort of a cyber café or from a lap-top anywhere, or even through the mobile phone.

Technology makes that a reality, but the adoption of ICT in many Kenyan universities and colleges, which are the very centres that transfer the knowledge, still leaves a lot to be desired.

The situation is that students have to first deposit tuition fees plus other payments in designated banks, and then personally deliver the bank deposit slips to the finance department of the university or college as proof that they have paid fees. 

In some universities, they will then be given documents known as “movement forms”. They have to move with these from one department to another to be registered.

Students who have gone through such a process say it can take a week to complete.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a fourth-year student in a public university says that on registration days, students start queuing as early as 5am to be among the first to be served when the offices open after 8am, and before the crowd builds up.

“Students arriving at the university compound on the morning of the opening day run straight to the main hall to wait for their turn to be registered.

"Some of us have lost belongings, such as phones, school fees and luggage, all as a result of the confusion,” continues the student.

The situation worsens as the double intake proposed last year to clear admission backlog is implemented.

By comparison, private universities are generally doing better than their public counterparts in terms of the use of ICT in administrative work.

Registration of students in established private universities is, by comparison, a relaxed experience.

New students can register remotely as long as they have Internet.

The United States International University (USIU) was among the first in Kenya to set up an online registration system.

Among the public universities, Kenyatta University (KU) was a first.

According to USIU deputy vice chancellor Rita Asunda, students, once admitted, are given online files that they use during their entire stay at the institution. 

They log into the university’s web site and key in their passwords and user names to gain access to their files.