Influence of Institutional Factors on Students Involvement in the Governance of Tertiary Institutions in Kisumu Central Sub County, Kisumu County, Kenya

Abstract

Corporate governance broadly refers to the mechanisms, relationships, and processes by which a corporate is controlled. It involves balancing the interests of many stakeholders of the corporation. In education, it’s the framework of roles, relationships, systems and processes within which authority is exercised and controlled. Corporate governance is gaining significant level of recognition in various sectors including in education since it clearly reflects the interactions among the various stakeholders. Despite this, there however seems to be a disconnect between various aspects of the stakeholders and their effects in governance which consequently affects effective governance. The purpose of the study was to investigate the influence of Institutional Factors on the student participation in the governance of tertiary institutions in Kisumu Central Sub County, Kisumu County. The study was guided by the following objectives; to establish the extent to which the transition nature of students, the size of institutions, programme arrangements and roles of institutions governing student involvement in governance influence their participation in governance of tertiary institutions in Kisumu Central Sub County, Kisumu County. The study employed descriptive survey design which targeted 298 lecturers and 14 heads of tertiary institutions in Kisumu Central Sub County. The participating institutions were categorized into National Polytechnics, regional polytechnics and county polytechnics. All the heads of the institutions were sampled since they were few and 166 of lecturers were sampled through simple random sampling. This represented 18% of all the lecturers. Two different questionnaires were designed to obtain data from heads of institutions and from lecturers. Data obtained was both quantitative and qualitative. Qualitative data were put under themes consistent with the research objectives in order to determine the relationship between the dependent variable which is the involvement of students in the governance of tertiary institutions and independent variables which include transition, size of the institution, programme arrangements and organizational rules; ANOVA (Analysis of variance test) was used at the 0.05 level of significance. Quantitative data was coded and entered into the SPSS programme of analysis. Findings from the study indicated that student involvement in governance will be ineffective if there was no transition institutional size, programme arrangements and organizational rules. From the study it can be concluded that institutional factors influences students involvement in governance but the extent varies from one institutional factor to another. The thus recommends that stakeholders involved in institutional governance should consider institutional factors when designing governance structures and making decisions on issues pertaining to governance.