funding for universities, putting all of them under increased financial pressure. According to a recent report commissioned by the Department of Higher Education and Training, expenditure on higher education in South Africa makes up about 12% of overall spending on education, whereas elsewhere in Africa it makes up some 20%. Universities here have thus generally lacked the funds to hire more lecturers or expand teaching facilities to accommodate rising student numbers. As a result, lecture halls are often too small to accommodate first-year classes that have grown to 600 students or more. Students commonly sit on the floor or spill out into passageways, where they battle to hear their lecturers at all. Academic staff are called upon to mark thousands of test scripts and cannot give students the detailed feedback they need, diminishing the learning experience.
According to the department’s report, the higher education system is thus ‘very inefficient’ and is ‘performing way below most of the targets set’. The report recommends that funding for higher education should be increased, but cautions that this should not be done until ‘high levels of inefficiency’, along with ‘corruption and mismanagement of funds’, have first been addressed and overcome.72
Despite the problems of over-crowding already evident, the government is nevertheless planning a vast increase in student numbers, which the fiscus will battle to sustain. All universities are thus likely to experience the pressures on quality, research, maintenance, and capital expenditure that currently dog the formerly black institutions, in particular. Moreover, without significant improvements in the quality of schooling, current high drop-out and failure rates will continue, adding to the wastefulness already evident. However, the government seems impervious to these risks. It has already established two new universities: one at Kimberley (Northern Cape) and the other at Mbombela (Mpumalanga), both of which admitted their first students in 2014. It also plans to establish a new medical university (the Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University) in Limpopo. In addition, it remains intent on increasing student numbers from 970 000 in 2010 to more than 1.6 million in 2030, a rise of close on 70%.73
High failure and drop-out rates at universities
Questions inevitably arise as to what benefits preferential admissions – and other affirmative action policies – are bringing when graduation rates among African undergraduate students remain worryingly low.
A bleak picture of student failure has recently emerged from two reports on throughput rates compiled in 2012 and 2013 by the Council on Higher Education, a statutory body charged with monitoring the state of the higher education system. According to the 2012 report, only 16% of Africans who enrolled in 2005 for three-year undergraduate degrees managed to graduate by 2007, within the regulation time, while 50% dropped out. By 2010, six years after initial enrolment, 41% of Africans from this initial cohort had graduated, while 59% had dropped out and had no further prospect of being able to gain their degrees. Graduation rates among coloured and Indian students were also low – at around 23% within the regulation three-year period – and it was only among white students that outcomes were significantly better, 44% graduating within the regulation time and 31% dropping out.74
The council’s 2013 report found a similar pattern among students who had first registered in 2006 for three-year undergraduate degrees. Within this group, only 20% of Africans had graduated in the regulation time, as opposed to 44% of whites. Financial constraints had contributed to these outcomes, the report went on, but the key factor lay in ‘systematic academic obstacles to learning’.75
Commented The Star in an editorial: ‘When you consider it requires a scandalous 35% average in matric to gain a National Senior Certificate, it’s no wonder so many undergraduates are not doing well, and will never earn a degree or a qualification … Neither Basic Education’s Angie Motshekga nor higher education minister Blade Nzimande can show they have changed the learning landscape for the better during their years of office … While finances remain a problem, this disaster is not only about money. It’s also about a lack of academic preparedness (read poor schooling) and … an appalling lack of ambition and will to improve public education in our country.’76
Increased state control for ‘transformation’
Despite the salience of such strictures, Nzimande seems more concerned about expanding state control over universities so as to ensure their further racial transformation. This is illustrated by two recent developments, in particular: the establishment of a special committee on transformation, and the additional powers given to the minister under legislation adopted in December 2012.
In 2013 Nzimande appointed a seven-member ‘ministerial oversight committee on transformation’ to audit progress at South African universities and advise him on policies to combat racism. The Council on Higher Education questioned the need for this new body, saying it had already established a committee of its own to monitor and assess this issue. Jansen was more forthright, saying the formation of the new committee ‘did not make any sense’. Said Jansen: ‘There is no university that is not struggling with transformation or fails to understand its importance. I don’t know why we need a policeman. A university is not a prison. It is an autonomous institution with smart people who understand their duty to the future.’77
The composition of the new committee was also criticised for omitting representatives of academic staff while including two trade union representatives. In addition, the vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Malegapuru Makgoba, was appointed as the committee’s chairman. Yet Makgoba is a controversial figure, who has allegedly inflated his academic credentials and has been criticised on his own campus as ‘authoritarian, divisive, and intolerant of dissent’.78
In October 2013 the committee issued its first report on transformation at universities. The report said that transformation was moving ‘at a snail’s pace’ and that it would take up to 382 years for South Africa’s top five universities to become demographically representative in terms of students, staff, graduates, and research outputs. (These five were UCT and Wits, along with the universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Pretoria, and Stellenbosch.) At other universities, the report went on, it would take some 43 years to transform the general staff profile, while ‘a further 40 years would be required for the research staff of such universities to reflect the country’s population’. Said Kesh Govender, dean of the school of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and one of the authors of the report: ‘The study shows that it is difficult to transform privilege, especially entrenched white privilege, voluntarily and suggests that extraordinary measures are needed.’79
The report used a supposedly scientific ‘equity index’ to measure progress in transformation. It explained its approach as follows: ‘The research applied an “equity index” when examining the demographic profiles of students and staff across South Africa’s 23 universities, and used race demographics from the 2011 national census as the baseline. The index, a quantitative measure based on the Euclidian distance formula, adopted the principle that the racial … demographics of a university should be as close as possible, if not equal to, national figures.’ The equity index was also used to ‘measure … the time frame it would take each institution to attain transformation’.80
Said Jansen in response: ‘We need normal universities in our democracy that are not defined by their tragic histories of exclusion … What we do not need, however, is a report that reduces the complexities of institutional transformation to an equity index in which you use a mathematical formula to measure the distance between “national demographics” and “organisational demographics” in each university; and then rank the universities from best to worst and declare some more transformed than others. This kind of simplistic thinking that reduces transformation to pigmentation is simply the flipside of apartheid reasoning.’81
The report was also unrealistic in overlooking the skills shortage, Jansen went on: ‘Try to find a black dean of law or a black head of actuarial science or a black programme director in forensics, and you will see us vice-chancellors
