KUCCPS CEO Mercy Wahome appears before the National Assembly Committee on Education on September 9, 2026. /PARLIAMENTUniversities, TVETs, and other tertiary institutions are required to remit Sh1,500 in placement fees to KUCCPS for each student successfully placed and validated by their institutions.
It has now emerged that some institutions defaulted on their payments, resulting in an accrued debt of Sh300 million and causing KUCCPS to miss its revenue target.
This emerged on Wednesday when the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) appeared before the National Assembly Committee on Education to discuss its budget implementation for the 2025/2026 financial year.
KUCCPS CEO Mercy Wahome told the committee that failure by institutions to pay placement fees resulted in the service missing its Sh284 million revenue target.
She said the service realised only Sh261 million during the year under review.
“Placement fees are monies invoiced to institutions after we have finished with placement. But some institutions fail to honour their obligations to pay, thus we could not achieve our target. We have about Sh300 million that has not been paid by institutions, mainly universities,” she said.
In the 2026/2027 academic year, KUCCPS placed 293,869 students in institutions of higher learning, with 202,133 securing placements in university degree courses.
Assuming all the students reported to their respective institutions at the start of the first semester in September, KUCCPS expects no less than Sh440,803,500 in placement fees from the institutions.
This is separate from the flat annual membership fee of Sh100,000 for universities and Sh70,000 for colleges, as well as the one-off fee of Sh1,500 paid by students during the application or course revision process.
“Once we place the students and they report, the service we give to the universities is to validate the data for them every semester so that the Universities Fund and HELB can process the funds to the universities. For that, we charge a one-off minimal fee of Sh1,500. Unfortunately, we have a situation where some universities do not remit,” Wahome said.
Committee vice chairperson Eve Obara sought to know which category of institutions — public universities, private colleges or TVETs — had defaulted on the remittances and what legal or administrative measures KUCCPS was taking to recover the debts.
Wahome said that, starting in the 2026/2027 financial year, KUCCPS had reached an agreement with universities to repay the outstanding debt in instalments.
Meanwhile, KUCCPS also told the committee that it spent Sh710 million during the year under review, translating to an 89 per cent absorption rate of its approved Sh796.5 million budget, which was entirely internally generated.
The Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, which also appeared before the committee, reported a 100 per cent budget absorption rate, while the National Council for Nomadic Education in Kenya (NACONEK) disclosed an overall budget utilisation rate of 96.46 per cent after spending Sh5.44 billion of its Sh5.64 billion budget.
