a decent research system and so on.
The vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg (UJ), a large multi-campus institution, foretold the same storm and unpacked its effects across the top tier of South African universities.
Ihron Rensburg: I think that all of us default to a kind of financial or economics argument to explain the crisis. And as the record shows, we’ve seen a long-run decline in per student state expenditure, and that decline now has the effect that the twelve leading research-productive universities now find themselves with 50 per cent or less of their income coming from the state’s side. And so, over a twenty-year period we have seen significant growth in tuition fees to close that gap. In the last seven years, my estimate is that across the sector, at least among those twelve or so universities, tuition fees have doubled. And the reason why that has happened is that salaries have increased ahead of inflation as expected, and when you give inflationary increases and 60 per cent of your costs is driven by your people cost, then you’re already in a big, big deficit. But of course there are other things in play as well. If we consider that in just the last three years the rand has halved in value against major global currencies, it has impacted our journal-purchasing capacity and our research infrastructure capacity, just to pick those two by way of example. And so all of these factors have basically put university inflation closer to 9 or 10 per cent on average over this last decade, and that has really been a major driver of the crisis that unfolded in 2015.
Yet even if the single most important factor in the 2015–2016 crisis was the declining government subsidy to public universities, such financial analysis means little unless one understands it in the context of the daily struggles of students on campuses. And vice-chancellors like Ahmed Bawa, who were engaged with students on the ground, could see that crisis in the eyes of the students.
Ahmed Bawa: You know, it depends on where you’re sitting in the system. I spent about six years at DUT and every single year we had demonstrations. I think there was [only] one year when we avoided a major clash. And the demonstrations were always over the same issue. Every now and then the students would add other issues to the demands, such as problems in the residences, but generally speaking it was about one thing only – financial aid.
What I’ll never forget is the experience I had at one of the demonstrations. I happened to be in this hall in the basement of the engineering building and there were thousands of students in there. And I thought I would take this as an opportunity to address the students. There was, as usual, a group of students toyi-toyiing, and it just so happens that I made eye contact with some students who were just behind this dancing group. And I caught sight of this group of students, boys and girls, who weren’t toyi-toyiing but who were just clearly in a state of anguish. I actually saw some of the women students crying, and it suddenly dawned on me that while it is true that some students were using this issue for political ends, ultimately it was really about access to higher education; it was really about students who come from very poor backgrounds who are trying desperately to get out of poverty. And this was their one step out of poverty. Some believed in the notion that getting a university qualification would get you out of poverty. And that forced me to be much more nuanced in the way in which I thought about this, and fortunately this happened quite early on in my years as vice-chancellor.
So to be honest, I wasn’t overly surprised by what eventually happened at Wits and UCT and Rhodes and UJ, and then, of course, the rest of the universities. Slowly but surely the needs of students who depended on financial aid would also reach these places.
This reference in the last paragraph to the more elite of the former white universities is an important one in that the issue of fee increases would have different meanings and impacts across the higher education sector. In fact, the student uprising revealed in dramatic ways the inequality across institutions, as UCT vice-chancellor Max Price describes in relation to arguably the most elite of South Africa’s 26 public universities.
Max Price: I think that the October 2015 events actually only happened on our campus at all because of national solidarity. There were no issues for us in terms of fees and affordability; we’ve been fortunate to be able to manage. And by way of example, the president of the SRC – the same SRC that led the Rhodes Must Fall campaign – proposed in the council the fee increase of 10,5 per cent. The SRC was completely aligned with that high fee increase because we’d worked through it with them over a month; that was in September, a month before the unrest. And because we worked closely with the SRC in setting the fees, they understood that all of the students on financial aid were completely covered. We do not have any ‘top ups’ or other things that they have to pay, and therefore they face a zero per cent fee increase anyway. And secondly, because we’ve got a significant number of middle-class students, more than 50 per cent, who can pay the full fee, we can cross-subsidise the so-called ‘missing middle’ students,1 which other campuses generally can’t. So even the students from households with up to R550 000 in income can get the necessary loans and financial aid from us. These students do end up with debt when they’ve graduated, and of course the debt is bigger when the fee increase is bigger, but it’s relatively manageable.
So the zero per cent fee increase campaign which started at Wits got exacerbated at the [Durban] Summit on Higher Education Transformation convened by Blade Nzimande in October 2015.2 The minister was incredibly condescending and dismissive of the students, as was reported to me, and that created a solidarity. And of course on many of the campuses, particularly the historically white campuses, the challenge is this ‘missing middle’ group of students because they don’t get the benefit of financial aid; they’re struggling. At the Summit, our SRC initially said that our campus wouldn’t be able to join this campaign, because they didn’t have a problem with the fees. But once the protests took off, there was this need for national solidarity, so it affected us too.
This middle group was not a new phenomenon in universities, but now it had a name. The ‘missing middle’ refers to those students who do not qualify for the government’s National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), because although their parents earned above R120 000 per year, this income was insufficient to pay the overall costs of a university education, which could run on average between R80 000 to R100 000 per annum. Here is a typical student story presented during one of my daily ‘open door sessions’ with students; let’s call her Katryn:
My mother is a teacher and my father has his own company. We did not qualify for NSFAS. The problem is there are two of us here at university, and even though to save money we decided to stay at home rather than in residence, my parents simply cannot afford to keep both of us here. My dad’s company has also been going up and down. He is still waiting to get paid by a government department. One of his friends also dropped him. Can you help us?
Katryn is one of many students who are not ‘the poorest of the poor’, to use a familiar South African expression; they fall between the cracks. And this newly visible demographic of students who were both not poor enough and not rich enough was beginning to gain traction within the public debates and the campus protests around fee increases.3 There was no plan for them. The poor were bailed out by government and the wealthy bailed themselves out. But the ‘missing middle’ were feeling the pinch of the annual tuition as they struggled to stay in the race, particularly at the historically white campuses. And it is this group, says Adam Habib, that identifies the student protests as ‘not a working-class revolt; you’re seeing a middle-class revolt in these universities because of the “missing middle”’.
Explosion in student numbers
If the decline in government subsidies placed pressure on institutional budgets, the rapid growth in student numbers exacerbated the situation to a crisis point. What was once an elite university system would quickly become, under the dual post-apartheid imperatives of democratisation and deracialisation, a massified system of higher education. The doors of culture and learning, to draw on the inspired Freedom Charter of the ANC, were now truly thrown wide open. In fact, university enrolments increased from 493 342 in 1994
