Higher Education in the 21st Century: Relevance, Sufficiency, Challenges and Remedies from Graduates’ Perspective

Abstract

Changes in life are ever bound to take place and as a result, what was important yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow, and education is not an exception. Prior to the 21st century, necessity of changes in education had been identified by many researchers and international organizations concerned with education. This had been brought about by the fact that things were changing and education had to keep the pace. In light to this fact, this study was carried out in Eldoret town, Kenya, in order to investigate whether education was up-to-date in the 21st century. It targeted university and college graduates. It was guided by four objectives namely: the relevance of education in this century, the sufficiency, the challenges facing the education in the century and the solutions to the challenges. 300 graduates from 28 different higher learning institutions were considered and data collected using questionnaires. Purposive sampling method was employed. Data analysis was performed in R software and Microsoft Excel for both descriptive and inferential statistics. The results show that, the rate of unemployment among graduates in Eldoret stands at 56.3% (p=0.0163) and 83.4% (p<0.0001) of these unemployed graduates are seeking employment. Among the employed, 59.5% (p=0.0180) are in non-self-employment. At higher learning institutions, majority (74.3%) of the graduates feel that they only gained knowledge while only 3.7% gained both skills and knowledge. Those who don’t find higher education in the 21st century useful in preparing