A renowned education expert has expressed worry over continued low uptake of students into the country’s public universities.

The worry follows selection of 7,410 students to the country’s main six public universities against total of 15,064 students who applied for space in the universities.

According to the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE), the selected number represents a 53% uptake.

“The Public may wish to note that a total of 15,064 applications were received by NCHE, of which 14,083 were eligible. From this number, 53%, i.e., a total of 7,410 (3,863 male and 3,547 female) were selected. This represents a gender parity of 52% male and 48% female,” said NCHE in press statement released on Friday.

Besides this, NCHE said a total of 32 special needs students are under consideration by the universities, a process that involves medical examination.

But commenting on the results, Dr. Steve Sharra has told us that such low uptake is a serious setback to the country’s higher education sector.

“This is not the best news that we would have expected because six public against that number, we could have done better than this.

Because this number is very small compared to the bigger context where we have got six public universities and we have more than two million young in the category of age-going-university (15 to 19 years old),” Dr. Sharra.

The six public universities in Malawi are Kamuzu University of Health Sciences (KUHeS); Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR); Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS); Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST); Mzuzu University (MZUNI); and University of Malawi (UNIMA).