Here is a question with no easy answers: Why do so many families here in Kenya still work so hard to get their children through to university, when it has been clear for several years now that a college degree, in any field at all, is no longer the golden key to a middle-class standard of life?

I used to believe that education – and especially tertiary education – was a blessing in and of itself, and that as many young people as possible should receive the support they needed to attain it. But I have since come to see it differently:

It now seems to me that – beyond basic literacy – some kind of cost-benefit analysis has to be applied to education, as much as to other things.

 “A good job” just about defines what any family would be content to see their son or daughter get after graduation. But if we look at the actions, as opposed to the words and promises of our leaders, at all levels, you will find that even the very best of them have no real idea how to create such good jobs.

Leaders seem to mostly hide behind the claim that they are “empowering the youth to create their own jobs.”

That is why barely a week passes but we have a governor somewhere announcing that he or she has “allocated” so many millions of shillings to a revolving fund from which youth can borrow to set up their own small businesses.

Speaking of governors, there was a news item last week that illustrates just how lacking in any original ideas most governors are, when it comes to the creation of economic opportunity for the residents of their counties.

This news item was a report that Ndaragwa town in Nyandarua county now has two “modern markets”, and is scheduled to have a third one.

The first one was built during the tenure of the first governor. The second was subsequently built by the World Bank. And now there is to be a third one, supposedly a project of the national government.

The strange thing is that all three of them are going to be in approximately the same location; virtually a stone’s throw from each other. And yet the first two are completely empty and have never been utilised.

Or so it was reported.

There is a context to this story: a modern market is often mentioned as an indispensable foundation for any kind of semi-formal business and would seem to be the most logical place for the young people in rural areas to start some small businesses.

And yet, in Ndaragwa as elsewhere, the markets remain empty.

So here we see a clear example of possibly well-intentioned projects, which serve absolutely no practical purpose. And this at a time when youth unemployment is routinely referred to as “a time bomb.”

Making things even worse is that we are on the cusp of an artificial intelligence revolution, which is going to limit even further the opportunities for new white-collar jobs, which most young Kenyans would define as “a good job.”

Let me explain:

I am old enough to remember President Mwai Kibaki going down to the coast to witness the arrival on Kenyan shores of the first fibre optic cable, which ushered in an era of fast and affordable internet services.

At that time, I was commissioned by a foreign publication to interview a top government official who was involved in this project.

He spoke in glowing terms of the opportunities that the fibre optic cables (there was more than one of them, each financed by a different consortium) would bring to Kenya.

The anticipated benefits included many things we now, roughly 15 years later, take for granted: online customer care services; online shopping; online banking; etc.

What he did not mention, and indeed could not have thought of, was that it would also open opportunities for academic fraud on a massive scale.

Websites already existed where jobseekers could register to write academic papers (ie essays) for students in (mostly) American universities who were too busy having a good time to be bothered to write their own essays, and were willing to pay others to do this work for them.

Kenya was in time to become notorious as a source of low-cost, skilled writers who, after doing the requisite research online, could draft a passable essay on just about any topic. Some dedicated essay writers were said to earn as much as Sh100,000 a month, just working on their laptops, from their bedrooms, with no other overheads.

Well, right now there are AI programmes, already in existence, which can write better essays-on-demand and write them even faster than our young people can.

And those programmes are mostly free.

Wycliffe Muga is a columnist