Something has shifted, and your teenager has probably noticed it before you have.
The assumption that a degree converts reliably into employment — which was broadly true for their grandparents and mostly true for their parents — is being questioned openly in Kenya now. Employers say graduates are not job-ready. Every family knows at least one graduate at home with a good certificate and no work.
Your child has seen this. Pretending otherwise costs you credibility on everything else you say about their future.
What is actually true
Three things at once, and most public debate picks one and runs with it.
A degree still helps, on average. Graduates still do better over a lifetime than non-graduates in most measures. The average conceals enormous variation, but it is real.
The variation is now the important part. The gap between a degree in a field with genuine demand, from an institution employers respect, and a degree in a saturated field from one they do not, is very large. Treating “a degree” as one thing is the actual mistake.
Signalling has weakened. When degrees were scarce, having one distinguished you. When a great many people have one, it stops being a differentiator and becomes a baseline — which means the differentiating has to happen somewhere else.
That third point is the one families most need to absorb, because it changes the strategy. The question is no longer how do we get the certificate but what will distinguish this person once they have it.
How to have the conversation
Do not lead with the discouraging version. A teenager who hears “there are no jobs anyway” from a parent learns fatalism, and fatalistic young people work less hard, not more.
Lead with the reframe: the degree is necessary but not sufficient, so what else are we building?
Then ask questions rather than delivering conclusions:
- What do people who studied this actually end up doing? Find three real examples.
- What would make you the obvious choice compared with the other applicants who will have the same certificate?
- What can you build, learn or do while studying that does not depend on the course?
- If this field is crowded in four years, what is the adjacent thing you could move into?
A seventeen-year-old who can answer those has a strategy. One who has only chosen a course has a hope.
The character question underneath
For Christian families there is a deeper issue here that the economic debate misses entirely.
If a degree is understood mainly as a purchase — money in, job out — then a graduate without a job has been defrauded, and the reasonable response is bitterness. A great many young Kenyans are somewhere in that feeling right now, and it is corrosive.
If study is understood as formation — becoming someone capable, disciplined and useful — then the certificate is one outcome among several, and its market value in a particular year does not determine whether the four years meant anything.
That is not a consolation prize. It genuinely changes what a young person does with a hard stretch afterwards. And it is worth saying out loud, more than once, before the hard stretch arrives.
Practical things worth doing during the degree
Say these plainly to your child, ideally in first year rather than final year:
Get real work experience, however small. Internships, holiday work, helping in a business. Employers consistently treat this as the strongest signal available.
Build one demonstrable skill outside the syllabus. Something with visible output — code, design, writing, bookkeeping, a trade skill. It does not need to be related to the course.
Meet people. Most first jobs come through someone who knows someone. Lecturers, alumni, church, industry events. Kenyan graduates who find work early almost always find it this way.
Do not neglect the actual marks. Some doors do still screen on them.
The honest ending
If your child asks directly — is this worth it? — the truthful answer is something like:
For what you want to do, probably yes. But it is not a guarantee, and it never was for everybody. What it gives you is a starting position. What you do with the four years decides more than the certificate does.
That is more useful than either the promise that it will all work out or the cynicism that nothing does.
And it prepares them for a possibility worth naming in advance: that they may graduate into a difficult market. If that happens, it will not be a verdict on them — and knowing that in advance is what determines whether they keep going. We have written about what to do when a graduate cannot find work, and about choosing a route without shame in the first place.
Common questions
So should my child skip university?
Not as a general rule. The honest answer is that a degree is a strong investment for some fields and a weak one for others, and the difference is now large enough that it deserves an actual decision rather than a default. Look at the specific course, the specific institution and the specific work it leads to.
Isn't it risky to tell a teenager the degree might not pay off?
The risk runs the other way. A young person who has been promised that a degree guarantees a job, and then does not get one, concludes that they personally failed. A young person who understood the real odds and chose anyway has a much sturdier footing when it is hard.
What actually improves employability alongside a degree?
Consistently: real work experience however small, a demonstrable skill outside the certificate, and a network. Students who do internships, hold part-time work, or build something visible tend to fare better than those who only accumulate marks.