The Trend and Effect of Higher Education Loans Board Funding on Access and Equity in Public University Undergraduate Studies in Kakamega-East Sub-County, Kenya

Abstract

The legal statute in parliament of HELB Act no. 3 of 1995 established HELB to assist needy students with loans to pursue higher education. The loans were to be allocated to them according to their levels of need. However, numerous complains among university students and some studies had casted doubt on whether the genuinely deserving cases were being considered during loan allocations unlike previously when funding was being done to all university students irrespective of their socio-economic backgrounds. Since Kakamega-East sub-county had the highest absolute household poverty index of 67.8% in Kakamega County, it implied that many of its students were needy. The purpose of this study was therefore to determine the contribution of HELB loans to access in public university undergraduate studies in the sub-county. The objectives of the study were to: establish the percentage of HELB undergraduate loan recipients as a proportion of the total university enrolment for the 2011/12 cohort in Kakamega-East sub-county; establish the trend of HELB undergraduate loan allocation to the sub-county between 2011 – 2014; and to determine the degree of fairness in HELB undergraduate loan allocation to the sub-county based on the criterion used. The study was guided by the socialist economics of education theory postulated by Louis Blank. It used both descriptive survey and ex-post facto research designs. The study population was 788 HELB loan applicants from the sub-county in undergraduate studies in public universities, 22 University Academic Registrars (UARs) of the chartered public universities in Kenya and 1 CEO of HELB. The study sample comprised 292 university students, 7 UARs and 1 CEO of HELB. Systematic sampling was used to select students based on the serial numbers of their HELB forms, purposive sampling was used to select the UARs of the 7 public universities that existed before enactment of the Universities Act No. 42 of 2012 while saturated sampling was used for the CEO of HELB. Primary sources of data were Questionnaires and Interview Schedules while Secondary sources were the processed HELB forms for students and proforma for document analysis for UARs and CEO of HELB. Face validity was used while the test-retest at 0.05 significance level on a two-tailed t-test for reliability obtained a coefficient of 0.96 for the study. In data analysis, the study established that 60.7% of total enrolment in public universities for the cohort was recipients of HELB undergraduate loans while an increasing trend of 0.92% per year characterised the HELB loan allocations. The study further revealed a relatively inequitable allocation of the loans to the students with a gini coefficient of 0.45 while the degree of unfairness in HELB loan allocation rose at a rate of 7.4% per year. The study therefore recommended for the review of the Means Testing Instrument (MTI) that HELB uses to allocate loans so as to ensure that it identifies deserving cases properly. These findings were significant to HELB in assessing its effectiveness in allocating study loans to university students.