Behind the laptops and lecture halls, Kenya’s campus generation is carrying a weight that nobody talks about
By Simon Juma
When society imagines university life, the picture is invariably cheerful — freedom, friendships, and graduation photographs with wide smiles. That is the story parents tell their children. But there is another story, quieter and far less comfortable, that rarely gets told. It is the story of silent pressure, grinding anxiety and daily survival.
Being a university student in Kenya in 2026 is one of the most demanding transitions a young person can make. Behind the smart casual wear and the open laptops, many students are struggling in ways that would alarm the people who love them.
The academic pressure alone is formidable. From childhood, the message is consistent: pass, excel, make your parents proud. On campus, the reality is more brutal. One lecturer teaches hundreds of students. Assignments arrive weekly. Continuous assessment tests are scheduled without consultation. The final examination carries 70 per cent of a student’s grade and, with it, 70 per cent of their anxiety. During exam weeks, students sleep for three hours and survive on photocopied notes, YouTube tutorials and fear — fear of retaking a unit, fear of missing the graduation list, fear of being discontinued. This is not a test of intelligence alone. It is a test of mental endurance.
Financial pressure runs alongside academic pressure, quietly and relentlessly. The Higher Education Loans Board disburses KSh17,500 per semester — an amount that delays for months and covers little when it finally arrives. Hostel rent in towns such as Nakuru, Nyahururu and Nairobi ranges from KSh5,000 to KSh12,000. Many parents in rural areas are supporting other children and cannot send money regularly. So students improvise. In lecture halls across Kenya, there are students who ride boda bodas after 5pm, run second-hand clothing businesses on Instagram, or do academic writing until 3am for KSh500. They attend an 8am lecture on an empty stomach, smile through the session, and check their M-Pesa knowing the balance will disappoint them. Concentration is a luxury when hunger is the dominant thought.
The mental and emotional burden may be the least visible and the most damaging. University is frequently the first time young Kenyans live far from home, separated from family, community and the support systems they have always known. Loneliness arrives quickly. So does comparison. Social media presents a relentless stream of former classmates who appear already employed, already mobile, already ahead. At 23, a student can feel like a failure before their career has even begun.
Anxiety, stress and depression are widespread on Kenyan campuses, but the culture of disclosure is thin. Men are told they do not cry. Women are told to endure. Counselling offices exist, but a single counsellor serving 10,000 students is not a mental health service — it is a gesture. Students fear the stigma of seeking help, so they suffer privately, withdraw from those around them, and in some cases make decisions that cannot be undone.
Final-year students carry an additional weight: the fear of what comes next. They watch graduates from 2019 still searching for work. They observe how corruption and connections shape hiring decisions. They wonder quietly whether their degree will matter, whether their mother’s sacrifices were worthwhile, whether the village they left will be the village they return to — empty-handed. That uncertainty does not merely cause stress. It erodes the motivation to keep going.
The solutions are neither complicated nor beyond reach. Universities must invest seriously in mental health — more counsellors, peer support structures, and services that are free, confidential and genuinely accessible. The academic calendar needs reform that prioritises learning over volume. Parents and guardians should ask not only about grades but about wellbeing. A phone call that begins with “are you alright?” costs nothing and can mean everything. And students must build the habit of honest conversation with each other — about failure, about being broke, about fear — without shame and without judgment.
University should build young people, not break them. If you are a student reading this and the weight feels unbearable, please understand that you are not carrying it alone. Many around you are feeling the same things and saying nothing. Talk. Reach out. Support each other.
We shall get through this. Tutavuka.
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