More than 200,000 students expected to join universities in September could become the first casualties of the government’s radical new plan to scrap undergraduate scholarships and replace them with loans, exposing them to millions of shillings in debt by the time they graduate.

Documents and submissions from the Ministry of Education to the National Assembly Education Committee reveal that the government plans to abandon the scholarship component of university funding and instead channel the money into student loans, effectively transferring the cost of higher education to students.