Credentialism is the practice of valuing formal qualifications over actual skills and abilities. It elevates formal academic degrees above demonstrated competence, practical output or innovative capacity. It treats paper qualifications as the primary currency of status, pay and advancement, often detached from the real economic value those credentials are supposed to generate.

In Kenya, this pathology has become systemic. Our obsession with credentials has created a highly educated but deeply unproductive workforce. A generation armed with master’s and doctorate degrees finds itself chasing job-group promotions and bureaucratic perks rather than building the firms, technologies and industries the country urgently needs.

The numbers expose the mismatch with unusual clarity. Kenyan universities awarded roughly 124,000 degrees in 2024 while the national economy hovered between $136 and $147 billion (Sh17.7 and Sh19 trillion). That produces a density of nearly 850 to 900 new university graduates for every billion dollars (Sh130 billion) of output; an extraordinarily high ratio.

By contrast, New Zealand manages a similar or slightly smaller graduate cohort with an economy of roughly $260 billion (Sh33.8 trillion). Ireland and Singapore operate with comparable or even lower absolute numbers of graduates yet sustain economies several times larger, in the $500 to $600 billion (Sh64.9 to Sh77.9 trillion) range.

The difference is not that Kenyan graduates are less intelligent. It is that their credentials collide with an economy still dominated by informality, where more than 80 per cent of new jobs arise outside the formal sector, and starved of the capital, infrastructure and commercial ecosystems that convert knowledge into high-value production.

This structural deficit has a clear institutional driver. In the public service, promotion across job groups, salary increments and associated allowances remain tightly linked to academic papers rather than measurable performance. The rational response of civil servants is to treat postgraduate study as a financial investment strategy. Degrees become consumption goods for personal advancement instead of capital goods for national productivity.

Research and development spending stagnates at about 0.8 per cent of GDP, well below the African Union’s one per cent target, and most university theses gather dust rather than become patents or startups. The result is a technocratic class skilled at compliance and policy drafting but poorly equipped, or poorly incentivised, for the risk-taking and iteration that innovation demands.

Rita McGrath, a highly renowned international expert on innovation and growth strategies, has argued powerfully that once we base credentialing on skill rather than degrees, the old edifice of higher education collapses. This is the direction the world is moving. We must, too.

The private sector and government must shift from degree-based hiring to competency-based assessments, evaluating candidates on their ability to perform. Brain drain follows inevitably from the current arrangement. When the domestic formal market cannot absorb specialised talent, the most capable leave. Diaspora remittances offer partial compensation, yet they cannot replace the lost tax base, mentoring capacity and local problem-solving that stay-at-home innovators would have provided.

Kenya is effectively running a high-volume education engine designed for a substantially larger, more formalised economy, plausibly in the $300 billion (Sh38.9 trillion) range or higher, inside a structure that cannot yet monetise the talent it produces.

The remedy is not to produce fewer graduates. That would be regressive, socially and politically untenable. The remedy is to realign incentives and expand absorptive capacity. Public service remuneration and promotion must be decoupled from pure credentialism and tied instead to concrete output: projects completed, efficiencies achieved, innovations deployed.

Universities must be required and funded to commercialise a meaningful share of their research through patents, prototypes and incubation to prove the practicality of their facilitation of knowledge acquisition.

Formal private sector growth must be accelerated through reliable energy, simplified regulation and targeted incentives for firms that hire graduates into productive rather than purely administrative roles.

Diaspora capital can be channelled more deliberately into domestic industrial and technological ventures rather than left solely as consumption remittances.

None of these steps is radical. They simply recognise that degrees alone do not create prosperity. Capital intensity, institutional design and markets that reward results do. Kenya already possesses the human capital. What it lacks is an economic architecture that treats that capital as an asset to be deployed rather than a signal to be collected.

Until policy corrects the public sector distortion that fuels credential inflation, and until the formal economy expands to match the talent pipeline, the country will continue to manufacture elite qualifications for a structure that cannot fully use them.

The comparative evidence is unambiguous: economies that absorb graduates productively grow larger and more resilient. Kenya can join them, but only by subordinating paper to performance.

Social impact adviser, social consciousness theorist, trainer and speaker, agronomist consultant for golf courses and sportsfields, and author of 'The Gigantomachy of Samaismela' and 'The Trouble with Kenya: McKenzian Blueprint'