Framework of Comparison

Since private financing of higher education presents a shift of financing from the government to the individual citizen; then family social status has a greater influence to accessing higher education. In simple words, the ability to pay for higher education by the individual is determined by family social status which can be allotted by a use of indicators like wealth, education, power, and sex ratio. However, Family Social Status was analyzed to depict two levels: high family social status denoting a family with high wealth. Such high wealth is denoted by this study as the one with high levels of education attained by half of members in the family, high levels of political power of members in the family (this applies to parents or guardians), and/or high levels of wealth (i.e. properties/agricultural products/businesses

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equivalent to large amounts of money), education, or political power of both sexes (female and male) in the family. Again, Family Social Status was analyzed to indicate a family with low wealth as a result of poverty/low levels of education attained by family members, low levels of political power of members in the family, and/or unequal sex ratio of wealth in the family. The main here is to evaluate whether the shift of the financing responsibility has facilitated or hindered the poor’s access to higher education.

(a) Family wealth

This was explained by family’s income generation capability, for instance, relatively high wealth (rich) or relatively low wealth (poor). Rich families have higher capabilities to generate income regularly. This was ascertained through workers salaries, family assets like furniture, houses, cars, farms/ ‘shamba’, livestock, etc; or income from workers in the informal sector like small shops, hawkers, street vendors, etc; again income from large businesses, industries, mining, private companies like Airtel, Vodacom, Tigo, Safaricom, Orange, etc. Those families displaying greater advantage to salaries, assets, or businesses were categorized as rich families and vice versa is true.

(b) Family education

This was explained by family education attainment level. It concerns with the level of education in which members of the family have achieved i.e. relatively high level and relatively low level. The higher number of family members with high levels of education signifies high income generation capability. This is one major means through which families are able to generate high income (i.e. through employment). Again, the families with highly educated members are very much aware of the opportunities available (including scholarships and loans); and thus have full utilization of those opportunities. For the demands of this study, high level of education was set to be the university education and/or diploma.

(c) Family power

This was explained by political occupancy of the parents or guardians. Political positions included president, Member of Parliament (MP), minister, ambassador, governor, councilor, commissioner, secretary of state, village chairperson, street chairperson, etc. However, the higher the status of the political position the more the influence one has on accessing higher

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education. There are two main reasons. First, high positions are good sources of income, for instance, a Kenyan MP earned about Ksh. 1million (USD 11,926)¹⁶¹ per month while the president earned about Ksh. 2.4million (USD 23,852). This is two hundred times what a common primary school teacher or police officer earn in a month. Similarly, Tanzanian MP earned about TZS 350,000 (USD 215)¹⁶² in a day as sitting allowance. Second, high political positions have great respect in the society to the point that it is possible for their children to access loans from the Loans Board especially. In fact some students whose parents were/are in occupancy of high political positions were able to get loans in Tanzania.

(d) Family sex ratio

It is a historical phenomenon that females are less respected in the African society and family than their fellow males. This has made many families to give priority to males than females when it comes to access to education. It has been reported since independence that access to university by females is limited for many reasons. One of the reasons is poor economic base that many rural women have. In effect, private financing affects female gender more than male. The current situation in Kenya and Tanzania diverts from the truth. Female students in private universities especially outnumbered male students. However, Most of these female students come from urban areas.

Access to education, particularly university education, is determined by a variety of factors that range from availability of higher education institutions to financing capability. The introduction of private universities in Tanzania and Kenya has widened the access to university. Prior to that, the existed public universities had lower enrolment rates. For example, immediately after independence (1963) Kenya had only one public university namely Nairobi University College with 571 students (Weidman, 1995). Consequently, enrolments increased considerably to 122,874 students in 2009 (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 2009). Beyond a reasonable doubt, the establishment of about 22 private universities with varying levels of accreditation has a contribution to such a tremendous expansion. Nonetheless, the institutional factor was measured through dependent variable-indicators like admissions to universities while looking at enrolment rates. Other variable-indicators were associated with financing of education to include the Loans Board facility, and unit cost

161 One USD equals to 84 Kenyan Shillings as at 15 April 2013, http://coinmill.com/KES_USD.html#USD=1

162One USD equals to TZS 1629 as at 15 April 2013, http://coinmill.com/TZS_USD.html#USD=1

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of university education. Moreover, Access to education was analyzed based on financial capability of students to accessing universities and university enrollments.

On financial capability various sources were examined. These were individual sources, financial institutional sources like Banks and credit institutions, Non-governmental sources like business companies such as Telecommunication companies (Vodacom, Tigo, Airtel, Safaricom, Orange, etc), charitable organizations (religious organizations and non-religious organizations), International Organizations Funding such as Carnegie (particularly for women), and the like. Again, sources from the government such as grants and/or scholarships, subsidies and loans were scrutinized too. The primary focus is to promptly analyse loans schemes since many students depend on government loans. Various factors were set to evaluate loans schemes. These are loan criteria (for eligibility), loan specificity (specific aspects that the loan cover), loan target (main objective), loan availability (application process-time limits), and loan sufficiency (sufficient to cover the costs of university education). The university enrollments were analyzed based on university category and unit costs. There are two main categories such as public and private universities. The unit costs in private universities are higher than the public universities. For example, IMTU (private university in Tanzania) charged USD 4500 (currently, USD 3600) as tuition fee and UDSM (public university in Tanzania) charges up to USD 1000 per year. Similarly, Daystar (private university in Kenya) charges USD 2440 per semester (i.e. USD 1220 per semester) while Kenyatta (public university) charges USD 715 per year.