Campus marriages: Are parents aware their children are playing house at university?
Across Kenya’s universities and colleges, students are setting up homes together — and paying a price their parents never anticipated. By Jackline Kathure Kenyan parents send their children to university with one expectation: academic success. What many do not know is that some of those children have quietly set up households — cooking, providing and navigating the full weight of domestic life before they have finished their first year. The trend of students cohabiting on campus is neither new nor rare. First-year women move in with fourth-year men. Young women manage household chores while their partners hustle for rent. The arrangement is dressed up as love. More often, it is convenience masquerading as commitment. As a fellow student, the reality is clear. Campus life already demands enormous bandwidth — assignments, Continuous Assessment Tests, chasing Higher Education Loans Board disbursements that arrive late if at all. Adding a domestic partnership to that load is not romance. It is a liability. The consequences are well documented among those living it. Financial pressure breeds depression. Cohabitation without the maturity or means to sustain it leads to unwanted pregnancies, and too often, to abortions that carry lasting physical and emotional consequences. Dreams quietly shelved. Potential quietly buried. Parents invest years of sacrifice to open doors for their children. Students owe it to themselves — and to that sacrifice — to walk through those doors fully, not distracted by domestic arrangements that belong to a later season of life. University is for building a future. Not rehearsing one you are not yet equipped to live.
