Why doesn’t every College recruit Kenyans?

I’m not remotely an expert here, but a college coach once told my kid that the Africans they look at typically require a full scholarship. Americans will typically come if you offer them 1/4 scholarship because the kids just want to be wanted.

Star athletes requiring a full really limits the number of quality T&F athletes you can have on the team, especially for the men.

I agree 100%.
It is not the job of a College Coach to promote or develop US kids. It is there job to WIN. Win the conference. Win the regionals. Win Nationals. It is rare for a College kid to run sub 13:15. There are dozens of Kenyans at the same age doing it every year.

I would add that it might be challenging to verify their schooling. Maybe they are not academically ready---look at how many native born college students struggle or take remedial courses. Language barrier could be huge too.

To add to the scholarship issue, many universities charge more for foreign students so there would be an impact on the budget (not huge in the overall athletic dept budget but huge for the track program).

The coaches at schools that can recruit the top HS runners aren’t interested in bringing in Kenyans. It’s been less desirable schools like UTEP, WSU and Tulsa that recruit foreigners. If I’m coaching at schools like Stanford or Oregon, I would have no interest in coaching a Kenyan national team. XC is not football so I don’t believe there’s pressure to win at all costs.

I'm wondering what the process is like from the school's end to make sure that foreign students have the right paperwork in place to legally attend school and compete in the US. My residency program takes on a small handful of foreign medical graduates every year. I'm not intimately familiar with the process, but it seems like the onboarding process for the ~5 foreign citizens takes more administrative time and effort than the onboarding for the other ~30 incoming residents combined. If the process is similar at the undergrad level, I could imagine that a lot of schools/programs just don't want to devote the resources to this.

In the case of many colleges it's not even the coach's job to win but rather supervise a team that will count towards the NCAA minimum number of teams required and attract applicants who want to run while they're in college. Most of these places will give at most a partial athletic scholarship, many give no specific athletic aid at all. You're going to need not only a full ride to get a Kenyan, you're going to have to deal with the cost of getting him/her to campus. Do you think Mount St. Mary or Loyola of Maryland have that kind of money in their athletic budget? Yes, occasionally a school like that, Hofstra recently comes to mind, and goes after a Kenyan but it was only one.

On top of that, there are issues with eligibility, academics, and language competence to deal with in the case of foreign athletes that make their admission more problematic than it is for US kids.

I went to a school that had a lot of foreign athletes over the years from Jamaica, Somalia, Uganda, Ghana and Hungary.
Only one runner from Kenya and he never even qualified for NCAAs.

I don’t know why they didn’t go after Kenyans more.
They do tend to go pro young and not have long careers. There’s a lot of pressure on them to make a living when they can and the competition in their country is steep.

You mentioned Mt St Mary’s.
They had Kenyans Peter Rono (Oly Champ) and Kip Cheruiyot (NCAA champ) at the same time in 1989.

Arkansas had a lot of foreign athletes but not usually Kenyans.

I get emails all the time asking for scholarships and have stopped answering them basically. Mainly because I don’t have an scholarships!

I guess a point I should have made more of is that cross country and track generally are not enough of a priority at most schools for them to invest in recruiting Kenyans or really foreigners of any kind. There are schools that are exceptions, Providence, Villanova, Iona. Others had stretches of time when they brought in foreigners, UTEP, Western Kentucky, Washington State, but those schools seem to have moved on. The Mount never followed up with bringing in Kenyans.

And many places essentially don't recruit anyone. My kids went to a pretty exclusive small D1 school. When they went to visit the campus they met the cross country and track coach who gave them his standard "recruiting" spiel. He told them it was unlikely they'd get in, most don't, he had no clout with admissions to help them get in, if they managed to he had no money to give them, but if they managed to get in he'd love to have them.

I like Kenyans; but the almost universally require a full ride. Not all schools can/will put multiple fulls in Kenyans. Also, without connections it can be hard to verify their actual talent.

But I also wonder why more P5 schools with scholarships and the ability to travel internationally to recruit are not more interested in bringing in Kenyans. If you do it right they are expensive, but are also able to score double digit points on the track at conference and earn fist team all conference honors in cross country.

Racism.

That’s a good point.

Few qualify academically. Even if they squeak in and you give them a full ride, what happens when they are ineligible next semester?

Academically ready like football players?

Oh, my dear. It appears that Kenyans might not be the only ones who have difficulty mastering Englislh.

Colgate?

Harvard

A lot of times a coach will have a direct reliable connection in Kenya, a coach from a prep school for example, that will feed them athletes.

Lots of reasons. As many of mentioned, Kenyans and African athletes in general expect fully rides. Same goes for Europeans. I have had Kenyan athletes coming out of JUCO with 5ks slower than 15:30 asking for full rides. Many JUCO kids, not just Africans, think they should be getting big scholarships because they've made nationals in XC or track when in actuality a time that qualifies you for JUCOs wouldn't score in 95% of conferences *I am talking purely from a distance standpoint*

There is also academic reasons. The African education systems are not great and English is not their first language. From personal experience I would say 95% of African athletes I have trained with or coached have struggled in school, not because they aren't intelligent but rather because they struggle with the language and aren't prepared for higher education.

I would also say that it can be hard to trust times that Kenyan athletes claim to have ran unless you are there to witness them. I know a JUCO coach who got a Kenyan athlete, had been promised certain times and it turned out the athlete had never ran a day in their life - this is fairly common. I have also known coaches who have been contacted by Kenyan athletes claiming to have ran quick times and never reply to the coach when they are asked for proof of their performances.

I hope this doesn't come off unfairly as I have had great experiences training with and coaching African athletes but this is just my experience.