Role of institutional managers in quality assurance: reflections on Kenya's University Education

Abstract

Universities are accountable to the stakeholders. To justify their continued existence, the managers of these universities need to guarantee the public that the institutions they lead offer quality teaching, research and community service. The study investigated how effectively university managers have played their role in quality assurance. The results indicated that private universities performed better than public universities in management of quality education. However, public and private universities suffered from interference by political and religious patronage. The other barrier to provision of effective management for quality assurance among Kenyan public and private universities was found to be negative ethnicity and nepotism. Kenyan public universities suffered from insufficient teaching and learning resources and a leadership that did not satisfactorily engage its stakeholders in decision making. It was recommended that managers of the universities should deliberately take short term leadership courses to boost their managerial skills as a significant step towards delivery of quality education. The skills acquired should be sufficient to respond to the challenges of quality education bedeviling the universities.