La mise en marché de l’enseignement supérieur au Kenya

Abstract

This article seeks to identify the rationalities of higher education marketization in Kenya and offer new sociological variables to help understand a transformation that first began in the 1980s. The higher education sector is today managed in keeping with mechanisms that mimic the operation of the market. Contrary to those who would argue that the successive reforms of this sector were imposed from the outside by international actors, the origins of this market are above all to be found in the role played by political elites and the strategies of administrators and instructors within teaching establishments. Under the pretext of responding to an ever-growing demand on the part of student-clients, the market mimeticism that has structured the higher education sector since independence in fact and above all serves the interests of elites and instructor-managers.